stbenge wrote:
> Sherry Shaw wrote:
>> stbenge wrote:
>>>
>>> It would be interesting if alternate realities were someday 
>>> discovered. Might explain some things.
>>>
>>
>> My dad the math teacher used to say cool things sometimes.  I remember 
>> one time he said to me, "What if what we think of as the solar system 
>> is really a carbon atom...it's clinging onto the exhaust manifold of a 
>> car...and, ten seconds from now, the driver is going to rev the engine 
>> really, really hard..."

Maybe 10 seconds at the larger scale equals 10 billion years at ours...

> 
> My dad once told me about a science fiction story he read once. It was 
> about a man who discovered a way to shrink himself. The man kept 
> shrinking, past the molecular, atomic and even subatomic level. He then 
> noticed that his surroundings looked like galaxies, star systems and 
> then matter as we see it now. He kept shrinking, and the pattern 
> repeated itself...

"He Who Shrank" by Henry Hasse.  I read it about 30 years ago in a 
collection
of classic SF stories edited by Isaac Asimov.

Not to be confused with the book and film "The Man Who Fell To Earth".

> 
>> That sort of thing will really jack around with your mind when you're, 
>> like, five years old...

Had a similar effect on me to what you describe.

> 
> I suppose. Or it could just give you a difference perspective on things.
> 
>> Yeah, I probably ought to be in therapy.....
> 
> Over that? Nah!
> 
> Sam

Then there is the same concept expressed thus:

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."

by the mathematician De Morgan.

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