Scientific Notation and the Scale of the Universe

Visit The Scale of the Universe

Scientific notation is a mystery to me.  Tell me that an elephant is 5 meters long?  I can wrap my head around that.  Tell me, however, that an elephant is 5 X 10⁰ meters long is a bafflement.

The problem, however, with comparing things across really large measurements, is that you need a way that people can wrap their heads around the differences involved.  We've talked before about how humans have a hard time with really large numbers, and how we need to find ways to help ourselves understand them; our sense just aren't built to work on those scales.

So, we can look at 5 X 10¹² and 6 X 10¹⁵ and intellectually understand that the latter has a couple extra zeros slapped on the end; but what does it mean?

Something electronic media can do that no other medium can do in an interactive way, is give us a visual representation of these scales; to help teach us the real difference between those two numbers above.

One of the best ways I've ever seen it done is Cary & Michael Huang's The Scale of the Universe.  With just a mouse scroll, it's possible to zoom in for an understanding of the size of smallest theoretical bits of existence and zoom out to the width of the known universe.

Seeing a neutron star (at 2.4 X 10⁴ kilometers) next on the scale to Rhode Island (at 7.5 X 10⁴ kilometers) gives a pretty sharp insight into the sizes of two wildly different objects.

Jump on over to The Scale of the Universe and scroll through for some mind-blowing information.