Magnitudinality
It feels to me like there should be more and better representations for the range of magnitudes known to apply to elements of our universe. One aspect of this which perturbs my thinking somewhat is: At what orders of magnitude should there be representations? Every 10x? Every 2x?
Maybe 10x magnitudes are a good starting place, as a sort of scaffolding for various other stuff.
What scale do most humans think on? Have we (as a species, not the obvious specialized individuals) broadened the range we pay attention to? I guess I'm more likely to grab a tweezers to modify something than I would be to lay the foundation for a new building. Then again, I've been more prone to hurtle around in automobiles than manipulate things with tweezers. In terms of what we can manipulate directly, human hairs are favourite benchmarks, having a diameter of 1 x 10-4 m *, with common 12-gauge wire being 2 x 10-3 m, my little finger tip is 10-2 m, my fist is about 10-1, and my full height is about 2 x 100, getting me to the largest sorts of things I can directly manipulate. Some few things over 10 m in diameter might mass little enough for me to push around, but they'd still be damned unwieldy!
I'm suffering an intense burst of curiosity about the scales of systems, abstract or physical. Are quarks still the smallest known particles? I see that if an atom had the same size as the Earth, a quark would be ½ cm. Checking, I see that Superclusters are the biggest known systems (they're clusters of galaxies). It would be neat, maybe even handy to know examples of systems falling into every order of magnitude of scale between Superclusters and the Planck length of 10-35 m.
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* m standing for "metre" except in the U.S.
Maybe 10x magnitudes are a good starting place, as a sort of scaffolding for various other stuff.
What scale do most humans think on? Have we (as a species, not the obvious specialized individuals) broadened the range we pay attention to? I guess I'm more likely to grab a tweezers to modify something than I would be to lay the foundation for a new building. Then again, I've been more prone to hurtle around in automobiles than manipulate things with tweezers. In terms of what we can manipulate directly, human hairs are favourite benchmarks, having a diameter of 1 x 10-4 m *, with common 12-gauge wire being 2 x 10-3 m, my little finger tip is 10-2 m, my fist is about 10-1, and my full height is about 2 x 100, getting me to the largest sorts of things I can directly manipulate. Some few things over 10 m in diameter might mass little enough for me to push around, but they'd still be damned unwieldy!
I'm suffering an intense burst of curiosity about the scales of systems, abstract or physical. Are quarks still the smallest known particles? I see that if an atom had the same size as the Earth, a quark would be ½ cm. Checking, I see that Superclusters are the biggest known systems (they're clusters of galaxies). It would be neat, maybe even handy to know examples of systems falling into every order of magnitude of scale between Superclusters and the Planck length of 10-35 m.
__
* m standing for "metre" except in the U.S.