Scale of the Universe

[brockers]

Oh yes, and don't get me started on things measured in either football fields or doubledecker feckin' busses!!

You won't like this then MDB!

Arch. No not that one. The rowing boat one is out there somewhere though.

(Is that Sterling 'Trust in Meee....., Close your eyes....' Holloway out of Jungle Book, doing the commentary?!)

 

[Archie_tect]

...all that floating around within an electron within the cells of a gnat on the back of a horse

 

[Yellow Fang]

I was a bit surprised how small Proxima Centauri was.

 

[Over The Hill]

If you travel at the speed of light for 25 years you will get from one side of Simon Cowell's ego to the other.

 

[Arch]

I did physics at school and college, although I was never amazing at it.
What gets me though is this attitude that we 'normal' people aren't able to grasp large numbers and ideas.
Hence, I utterly despise type of presentation where it goes something along the lines of

'If I have a piece of sting..... and if this is a year..... and that is a million years..... then a billion years will be out in the car park....'

GO AWAY AND STOP BEING SO PATRONISING!!

Oh yes, and don't get me started on things measured in either football fields or doubledecker feckin' busses!!

Vernon's right, it's not patronising in the slightest, it's a basic human need to understand scale. The term 'one billion' is meaningless unless you know what a billion is, and how it relates to a million, and a thousand and a hundred and ten and one. You learned to count understanding that 2 was twice as many as 1, and 4 twice as many as 2 and so on. That piece of string is just representing the concept in one way, where strings of zeros are another way.

And if a number is a random concept mentally, then size or weight is even more so. I used the double decker bus very successfully in a seminar on the loaded capacity of various types of Viking ship. I don't think any of the people in the room could have visualised 7 tons, beyond it being 'very heavy', but they understood the weight of a bus.

We have a bike path starts in York, and goes to Selby, and all along it is a scale model of the solar system - the planets are to scale, as are the distances between them. It's a brilliant way for people to understand the vastness of just our little bit of space, seeing a ball bearing sized Earth, in a 6 mile long route.

http://www.solar.york.ac.uk/

 

[vernon]

We have a bike path starts in York, and goes to Selby, and all along it is a scale model of the solar system - the planets are to scale, as are the distances between them. It's a brilliant way for people to understand the vastness of just our little bit of space, seeing a ball bearing sized Earth, in a 6 mile long route.
http://www.solar.york.ac.uk/

I was admiring the very same model just this weekend. My mind never fails to be boggled by the model.

As an aside, the wild cherry trees lining the route look rather promising for next months crop of drupes. I do like the taste of wild cherries.

Back to the model solar system, it's a very clever concept and gives a better idea of the scale of things far better than any portable model planetarium could ever deliver.

 

[Arch]

I was admiring the very same model just this weekend. My mind never fails to be boggled by the model.

As an aside, the wild cherry trees lining the route look rather promising for next months crop of drupes. I do like the taste of wild cherries.

Back to the model solar system, it's a very clever concept and gives a better idea of the scale of things far better than any portable model planetarium could ever deliver.

The thing that brings it home to me is the way you pass the inner planets within a minute or less, and then once past Saturn, you travel a km or more between planets. And I think the fact that you're making physical effort makes the distances more comprehensible.

Also, the tiny tiny moon and Earth, compared to the footballs of Jupiter and Saturn.

 

[Archie_tect]

Very small... far away...

Er, no Ted.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Like it! I did a physics degree and yet this stuff still boggles my mind!

Lots of similar 'powers of ten' videos on Youtube too. Does anybody remember that video (probably the first of the kind) using the guy in the rowing boat as the start reference?

I think you mean the the Eames brothers original, 'Powers of Ten', made in 1968, although the guy is on a picnic blanket, not in a rowing boat. There is a site here: http://powersof10.com/

The Eames brothers were a fascinating duo - primarily architects and designers, they did all sorts of interesting stuff.

 

[Archie_tect]

The Eames brothers were a fascinating duo - primarily architects and designers, they did all sorts of interesting stuff.

FM!.... Charles Eames was the architect, Ray, who was his second wife, was an artist.
The Eames House was a modernist house made up from pre-fabricated industrialised parts so was innovative in that it wasn't designed on an 'Arts and Crafts' basis typical of middle class America. Charles Eames designed The Eames chair but to be honest it was probably the first architect designed chair that was comfortable to sit in... compared to Rietveldt's and Le Corbusier's.

 

[brockers]

I think you mean the the Eames brothers original, 'Powers of Ten', made in 1968, although the guy is on a picnic blanket, not in a rowing boat. There is a site here: http://powersof10.com/

No! No! No! There is a rowing boat one out there! *Googles furiously* It zooms in on the mosquito sucking blood from his arm iirc. Arch'll back me up on this, won't you?! (Look back through the the thread. That Eames vid has been linked to previously. And I've checked the credits and Philip Morrison is narrating, not the bloke from 'The Jungle Book')

 

[Arch]

No! No! No! There is a rowing boat one out there! *Googles furiously* It zooms in on the mosquito sucking blood from his arm iirc. Arch'll back me up on this, won't you?! (Look back through the the thread. That Eames vid has been linked to previously. And I've checked the credits and Philip Morrison is narrating, not the bloke from 'The Jungle Book')

Yes, I do remember the rowing boat one. Wasn't it an animation that changed to live action as the boat was rowed away at the end? Or vice versa?)

Dammit, I've seen it recently on a website, but can't remember the link.

<goes to google more>

 

[Arch]

Yes! My google-fu is strong today.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/cosmic_zoom

Just needed to google "scale of universe rowing boat"

 

[threebikesmcginty]

There's a nice model of the scale, size and distance, of some planets on the gallery at the Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford. It's worth a visit anyway if you haven't been there and it's free!

http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

 

[brockers]

Well done Arch! Interesting that these videos were both made in the late sixties. Back when cosmology and astrophysics was 'ard, and superpowers were getting men into space. Apparently though, there's been a resurgence in applications for physics at 'A' level and college, due to that recently discovered phenomenon known as the Cox Effect.