The three-pound laptop you carry one-handed from kitchen to den, sipping a cup of coffee with the other: not 30 years ago  a machine of the same power would have required a building to house and run it.  On its screen, pull up photographs capturing a nebula light years across or the beauty of a cell's construction; order a novel that uses the spread of cancer within an individual character to examine global economic and environmental policies; peruse an on-line  issue of Scientific American, whose cover announces that “Big Physics Gets Small.”  

Forget your laptop.  Using far more specialized instruments, scientists look 13,000,000,000 years into the past and see the universe's roiling birth, record the decay of a cesium atom to measure time to the billionth of a second, trace the progress of particles so tiny we can know they're there only by inference, identify precisely the flawed gene that brings an elephant, entire, to its knees.  

 

Forget the machine altogether.  Consider how a poem may deploy a single, precise image to capture the sweep of human history, or geologic; admire how Blake collapses, with such dizzying speed, the greatness of a World into the smallest thing he can perceive with his naked eye, and in the same gesture, by mere inference, makes of that world billions, a whole beach's-worth of worlds he can scoop into his palm and run through his fingers.  

Imagine a global economy, billions of dollars moving in the form of electrons every minute.  Imagine that in this world, a man who lends third-world businesswomen as little as $12 each effects change so significant he wins the Nobel Prize--not for economics, but for peace.

Imagine Wallace Stegner driving his aunt, fresh from the Midwest, into southern Utah.  As they approach the Book Cliffs, sheer rock faces soaring a thousand feet from the desert floor, he waits for her to notice them.  When finally, puzzled, he points them out, she compares them to the 30-foot bluffs edging the river back home.  She can't adjust herself to the enormous sizes and distances of a new, unfamiliar landscape.  She can't even see what she's looking at.

Imagine a universe made up, fundamentally, of tiny strings, vibrating in more than three dimensions; imagine these strings extending into branes, enormous higher-dimensional expanses.  Recall a moment when you moved unexpectedly out of a small alcove into a great sweep of space--how that opening took your breath away.

Scale:  Artists and physicists and geologists, poets and architects, economists and musicians, biologists and activists and philosophers dream in it, considering balance, interval, proportion; weighing quantity and quality, inches to miles, a note or volume against another.   Where are you standing, now, as you hurtle on this negligible rock of ours through space?  What can you see from where you stand?  Most of the time, we manage scale, and shifts in scale, automatically, without thinking.  But when we do attend to matters of scale, or alter our position in relation to the world we observe, our visions of reality may shift, and what we accept as ordinary may become suddenly, vertiginously strange and new.   Join physicist Lisa Randall, poet and Renaissance scholar Linda Gregerson, and philosopher of architecture and design Sanford Kwinter, as we examine how scale determines what we see and know--and therefore also the power of our dreaming, and of our dreams to enter the world.