Topsy-Turvy Corporate Culture - From Tiny to Enormous

Let's face it: We humans are rubbish at logs.

I don't mean the huge cuts removed from tree stumps, but rather the mathematical powers of ten that scale up or down our everyday existence. N.dG.T. related a convincing illustration of our teensy experience relative to outer space in his first stint hosting Cosmos; here's another from the JLC archives.

Now, I've been working in pharma for some time, usually in tiny start-up companies with 10-100 people (log₁₀ = 1-2). Recently, I made the jump to "Megapharma," clocking in somewhere around 5 logs (To calibrate you, the total student population of UT-Austin is ~4.7 logs, and the population of Los Angeles is 6.6 logs). It's professionally equivalent to feeling like a single grain of salt in a heaping tablespoon.

And hey, this is only a two-log difference!

Not that I'm an introvert, either: I've been ENTJ for as long as I can remember. I'm perfectly fine with bustling parties (1.5 logs) or attending conferences with ~3. But this type of scale jump takes some adjustment. I find myself buried in organizational charts, figuring out exactly whose workflow covers my next project. I apologize when re-meeting people I've met two weeks before - just not enough space on the mental whiteboard for all the new names. Gone are the days when I could just poke my head in my colleague's lab to get a reagent, or speak directly to my company's founder. The enormities of scale preclude certain "normal" social interactions.

All this to say that my posting schedule will remain sparse until I wrap my brain fully around this new reality. It's not all bad news: Small sub-groups meet to offer community to new folks like me. Megapharma uses lots of ingenious workplace engineering to make the place seem smaller - potted plants, kitchenettes, warm colors, etc. After a little while, my brain will loosen and change, and you'll see floods of new posts about the joys of meetings (to plan other meetings) and #BigPharma life.

Oh...and more chemistry whimsy. Promise.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Have you seen this cool new NASA "astronomy picture of the day?" It allows you to move up and down through the dimensions of the known universe - level by level, scale by scale.

Sadly, not included in the graphic.
Source: Namco / PlayStation

Building on an earlier version released in 2010, the Huang twins (Mike & Cary) have really outdone themselves this time. Now fully equipped with smooth transitions, helpful fact boxes, and awestruck ambient music, the graphic allows viewers to move through 62 orders of magnitude  (a "1" followed by 62 zeroes, or 100 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion!) to explore phenomena ranging from the immense observable universe, down through galaxies, asteroids, animals, cells, atoms, and particles, to the infinitesimally tiny Planck constant. The experience feels somewhat like playing the popular "stuff-collecting" game Katamari Damacy. 


Browsing the site, I zoomed into the realm where we chemists usually find ourselves, somewhere between 1 micrometer (10^-6 m, one micron, where the larger viruses hang out) down to around a femtometer (10^-15 m, about the size of a single proton). Honestly, that's a huge zone to play around in, roughly nine orders of magnitude. Put in human terms, the larger viruses are to protons what Jupiter and Saturn are to us! 


Encouraged by the classic Feynman lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist lays down the foundation for nanotech, I pushed further down the size scale, past various flavors of quarks, down to the neutrino, still our smallest detectable particle at (about) 1 yoctometer (10^-24 m).

Hey, who turned off the universe?
"Nothing down here but us strings..."
Source: htwins.net

Then...nothing! For the next ten orders of magnitude, down to quantum foams and strings, there was just empty space. So, what's down there? The subconscious? The Higgs boson? Tesseracts?


Honestly, I don't know enough quantum physics to tell you. If any of my readers are better versed in the subject, please write in. To parrot Feynman, 10¹⁰ seems like entirely too much room to have nothing in it.


Update (5/5/12, 11:00AM) - A reader alerted me to an old xkcd comic that covers much of the same ground...