A children's movie and book revolves around the astronomical idea of our size in the space of the universe.
I just saw the movie Horton Hears a Who with my family. I already knew the story from the Dr. Seuss book. While the movie, by necessity, adds material to the book to make it long enough to fill 88 minutes, it keeps the theme of a whole world of people that fits on a speck.
Whoville, this world on a speck that sits on a bit of flowering clover, feels normal-sized to its inhabitants, but compared to Horton the elephant's world, it is almost immeasurably small.
This is an idea that pops up in the astronomical world. Maybe our universe, while seeming incomprehensibly large to us, is actually the size of a soap bubble floating in someone else's universe.
While there may be only one universe - ours - a popular theory exists that there are multiverses, each one vastly different from the next. The trick, though, is that for the most part universes are not able to communicate with each other so there is no ability to know what other universes are like or even that they are really there.
Dr. Seuss presents this idea of two "universes" yet they are still able to communicate with each other, although with great difficulty. Scientists would love to take a page from Dr. Seuss's book and use a big bull horn to shout at our cosmic neighbors. In any case, the movie or book is a great way to introduce the idea of multiple universes to children.
