To see the world in a grain of sand…

It is a good thing to marvel, every once in a while. When you think about how little time we spend marveling––given the world we live in, given our place in it, given our short time on the Earth––it’s tragic that we don’t relish every opportunity.

So, to give ourselves a chance to marvel for a bit, consider this image which was the grand prize winning photo in a science photography contest some years back.

The image is of a single stronitium atom. Just one. Now, there’s a lot of prep that goes into lighting up an atom like this, and there are all kinds of other atoms in this image that are not showcased. And yet, there it is in all of its fundamentalness and individsibility––the least amount of strontium that is still strontium. There are billions upon billions of such particles in the universe. But here is one and one alone. How can I feel dwarfed by something so small?