| ▲ | Developing an Intuitive Sense of Scale(magworld.pw) | ||||||||||||||||
| 29 points by vismit2000 4 days ago | 5 comments | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | d--b 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
While it is easier to think of large numbers in terms of logarithms, cause it makes unfathomly large numbers much more palatable, I disagree that it makes scales more intuitive. 1 billion is a very large number, and thinking of it as 10^9 make it seem smaller. 1 trillion is "just" 3 orders of magnitude above 1 billion, and "only" 9 orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms in a mole. I don't know the answer to making the mind understand scale. I don't think things like "it 's about 2000 football pitches" help either. I don't think "a billion is the number of cubic milimeter in a cubic meter" work either. I don't think the logarithm based "zoom visualization" work either. I just think the brain just cannot picture what those numbers mean. We're not wired to understand those things very well, just as we aren't wired to work with 4+ dimensions | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | thunderbong 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Very interesting. Focusing on the magnitude instead of the value of a number, changes the perspective when we're talking or thinking in these scales. From the site: > The universe is very large, but it is not infinite. All quantities in the universe (distance, time, energy, mass, etc) exist within 50 to 100 orders of magnitude. > The human species interacts with only 25 of these magnitudes. | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||