Motherboard

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“Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins," Victor Hugo wrote. Said Tom Hulce in Animal House, “Our whole solar system…could be, like…one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being… That means, one tiny atom in my fingernail … could be one little tiny universe!”

Says News Junkie Post:

“There are many topics in Astronomy that are fascinating, but one of the most intriguing is the Bootstrap Hypothesis. This cosmological idea contends that as we examine the larger and larger things in the universe, they are ultimately microscopic parts of a far larger universe, one that merges with the very small. In essence, it contends that we are all living in a universe inside ourselves.
The scientific process is anchored in cold, hard facts, but some of the most tantalizing elements of it for me have always involved what is commonly (and improperly) known as ‘theoretical science.’ This is actually great leaps of postulation from minor pieces of evidence, the far fringe of speculation that can sometimes turn out to lead to the truth. For instance, in ancient times careful observers could infer that the Earth is round, and not flat due to the shape cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse. Though this likely defied the common beliefs at the time, it turned out to be true.
The aptly titled Bootstrap Hypothesis is the perfect example of speculative notions that are brilliant mind candy. This was the brain child of Theoretical Physicist Geoffrey F. Chew in the 1960s, and states that the macrocosm and microcosm literally meet, forming a sort of loop in our universe. Instead of thinking about the universe in size as linear (infinitely small to infinitely large), it is all self contained within itself.

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While we chew on and twitter about that for the next few minutes, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider are actually working to recreate the universe in the space of a speck of a speck. Motherboard took a trip to see the experiment.