Final: The Small

            I hadn’t thought too much about the small before this class, but after connecting everything we talked about in class to the small, or the nano, I think I have a better idea now. We started out this class reading Feynman’s talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” which talks about the crazy idea of encoding an entire encyclopedia on the head of a pin. After going through this class, that idea doesn’t sound so crazy any more. Everything in our world is heading toward the small. Our tools and resources are all getting smaller—cars, engines, computers, phones—our entire world is shrinking due to globalization and the increasing interconnectedness. All the texts we read showed the progression of this movement toward the small: the word virus, the Hand, tiny vials that provide mental and physical alterations, nano plagues, metapheromones and pollen that contains stories, nants, orphids and Chu’s knot code to another reality. These may be science fiction books, but they are merely taking the patterns of the past and present and projecting them into the future. There is clearly something alluring and efficient about the small and we are undoubtedly moving toward it.

I was kind of glad when someone brought up the butterfly affect the last week of class because that really put a label on the way I’ve been feeling about the small: the tiniest variations early on create large variations later on. I wasn’t thinking so much about the variations though, but more just about how the small affects things on a larger scale. The tiny neurons firing in our brain create our thoughts, actions and entire lives; tiny animals like bugs are the beginning of an entire food chain that keeps us alive; things as tiny as pronouns and letters at the end of a word tint an entire language with gender. I see the small as something much more significant now than I did before. The small effects all the big things in our world, but also many of the big things in our world are becoming smaller. It seems like the small is at both the beginning and the end of a lot of things.

One of the texts that particularly made me think about the small was The Filth because it was all about this absurdly small organization that had more power than anyone in the real-sized world. It was difficult to think about an entire society all occurring in a puddle of garbage on the floor of some man’s house. That was one of my favorite parts of the book: the image of Feely collapsed on the floor, his eye level with the ground, with the Hand headquarters in that murky puddle, infinitely small compared to even the tip of the pen in his hand. The Filth really put things in perspective and a lot of this class, and my thoughts on the small, have been about perspective.

One of our discussions from class stands out to me in the way I think about the small. We were talking at some point about how we measure things. By how big they are? How long they exist? How much they change over time? How much they change the things around them? It seems like those first two are how we tend to measure things, but maybe the last one should be how we really measure things. The small doesn’t get enough credit, but if we measured by that last standard, that wouldn’t be so.  This course has really made me think about the finer details in life and get down to the root cause of things. Which is more often than not, something much smaller than expected. I had better start paying more attention to the small though because it looks like it is an up and coming star of the future.