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Comprehending the World Through the Dimensions of an A4 Paper

Math has fascinated human kind for long. The magic of numbers, the patterns it creates and humankind’s grasping of it through observation led to the creation of the metric system, which defines the standard units of measurements of several things we use every day.

The humble A4 paper, which has the dimensions of 210×297 millimeters is extremely special – not because of the number in particular, but because of how we humans have systematized the size to fit into a bigger order of things!

Get ready to explore the universe through the dimensions of a simple A4 paper!

To begin with, let us understand the role the metric system plays in creating the magic. Take a sheet of A4 paper and divide into two. Each twain is exactly half that of the whole and exactly the same shape as the whole with the ratio of its sides identical. Try it with non-metric paper like origami or metric, and you will see that this property does not hold true! That is why you can see the world through an A4 paper and not other sizes.

If you divide a sheet of A4 paper in half you get A5, and dividing that in half gives you A6 and so on. The same holds true for the other way around. Double it to get A3 and double that to get A2, and then A1 and A0, which is equal to exactly 1 m2 of paper. Remember, no matter how much the size increases or decreases, the shape is the same and the dimensions are proportionate. This lets you create anything you want on an A4 size to be scaled up or down to suit any requirement. While it makes calculations for practical jobs such as printing easier, with practically no wastage, these metrics can create a far more satisfying and hypnotizing exponential spiral of literally everything there is around you!

If it were possible to physically keep diving a piece of A4 size in half, you could physically see! A4/28 is the size of a bee. A4/212 is when you would probably reach the size of a bug’s organ’s and also the limits of a human’s naked vision. At A4/224 you would reach the size of an individual cell of the bee. A4/232 would take you down to the mechanical ‘brain’ structure of each individual cell, where you would find chromosomes and DNA that are essentially the blueprints that reside within each living building block of an organism, that is the cell. A4/239 is when you would have reduced to a size so small that light wouldn’t be able to penetrate. If you tried to comprehend this in atomic terms, A4/256 would give you the width of an individual strand of a DNA. A4/264 is the width of a single atom of hydrogen. If you further kept dividing this size to enter the electron orbital and the interior to discover the very essence of matter, you would end up at nothingness, in the sense of your understanding of physical matter. The center of the atom made of a single proton which is 1/100th the size of the atom is found at A4/297. Further dividing it would take you into a realm of appearing and disappearing quarks. Here you would hover above the edge of the abyss of quantum deep. Plunge in further and you would fall into nothingness for twice as many as divisions as you have already made and you would reach an incomprehensible quantum madness, right at the floor of the building blocks of the universe we live in! That is when you would reach the limits of any current theory currently in existence as developed by humans. This is the smallest size, you may say, of the pixel that shapes reality as we know it. This dimension is roughly A4/2225.

Don’t let your head reel! Let us get back to our reality of humble A4 piece of paper – a simple 210×297 millimeters. Keep doubling it to reach the size of table. At A4x26, you’d reach the size of an average room. At A4x212 you would probably have the size of the building you’re sitting in. Keep doubling to include the size of the street the building is on, the neighborhood, and at A4x224 you would have the size of an average town. Quadruple it to get the size of a small city. A4x236 gives you the size of some of the largest cities in the world. A4x248 is where accomplishments of human civilizations begin to fade and only the light we create can be seen. A4x255 covers the distance of the earth’s farthest artificial satellites. A4x260 is where you’d meet the moon orbiting the earth. To give you better context, this is far enough for the light emitted by us on earth to take one full second to reach the moon! Past A4x268, earth gets too small to be visible. A4x276 reveals the orbits of Venus and Mars. A4x280 is the distance between where you initially started to the sun! A4x290 is where you cross the limits of the orbits of the last planets in our solar system. A couple more doublings and Voila! You reach the farthest any human-made object has travelled. At A4x2110 you would have left our home star. From here, if you travelled for a month at the speed of light, you would reach the Oort cloud with icy planetesimals that occasionally get knocked off their orbits fall inward into. Another year of travelling at light’s speed would get you to A4x2124, which is where you would finally leave the sun’s gravitational dominance. Keep doubling to mostly bump into nothing, because at this point, you would reach to discover the true nature of space, ever even our nearest stars are visible just as dots. Continue doubling to A4x2140 and you would find the appearance of an illusion of something solid – our galaxy! At the speed of light, this is 100 millenia across. At A4x2168, enormous galaxies themselves would have reduced to farther star-like visibility to create galactic filaments, which are some of the largest known structures to humans. These could be the last threads of light in the void which is our universe. At just 184 doublings of a single sheet of A4 paper, we reach the limits of the vastness of everything we know – the edge of the universe we are able to observe so far. A4x2184 can contain 2 trillion galaxies!

Fascinated? We are too!

There are endless possibilities in the world we live in. Unleash them all with Galaxy Brite A4 paper.

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