Humanity? you can lump it

Heard this on the radio and.. well it made me pause for thought. Tom Stoppard's Hapgood has been put on again - Stoppard loves to play with philosophy and physics. This was a gem that got quoted. Most of the ato is empty space. So if you put all the electrons, neutrons, and protons of the 6 billion human being next to each other, how much space would it occupy. I didn't believe it either.  Tom Stoppard says memorably "Make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of an atom, then the atom is as big as St Paul's, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom, then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in an empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar." We are a race of ghosts.

Interesting because the portrayal of the human soul is often head or heart sized. When our entire embodiment is ghostly. I enjoyed the way in which souls were portrayed in the recent Pullman film The Golden Compass as daemons in the form of shape shifting animals external to their owners who accompanied them. Personally I think materialists have a lot to answer for. There is so much more in heaven and earth than we imagine.

How spooky - back in Christchurch college again.. perhaps we should apply degrees of separation to metaphors also.