The Universe In A Grain Of Salt

Essay, Research Paper

The Universe in a Grain of Salt

The universe is infinitely larger than the human mind therefore how could one understand the universe. Sagan compares the human mind and its parts to a grain of salt. He says that there are more atoms in the grain of salt than there are dendrites in the human brain. Sagan puts the intricacies of the universe into a grain of salt. Since the mind cannot grasp the full meaning of a grain of salt it has not much of a chance of understanding the universe. The fact that the numbers of atoms in a grain of salt out number the dendrites in the brain is astounding. The fact that the universe is infinitely large than the capacity for learning of a single human being makes one realize that everything about the universe will never be known. The capacity that the mind can hold has been set by nature and if one were to learn all about the universe they would have to still find another place to store information. Sagan says that one cannot know the universe because there are not regular rules governing it. New exceptions the old rules are being found and that is how the information about the universe has come about. In comparing the vastness of the universe to a grain of salt Sagan implying that we are like a grain of salt in the universe.

Work Cited

Sagan, Carl. Can We Know The Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Salt.

Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing. Ed. Nancy R. Comely, David Hamilton, Carl H. Klaus, Robert Scholes, Nancy Summers. 5th ed. New York: St. Martin, 1998. 132-137