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Here at ASTC, I have heard a few great examples of a minor art form in  
which people try to explain how small, numerous, or large something is  
by analogy.  They invariably start with "if you put [or took].

I would like to start a collection of these short analogies, so please  
contribute:  Here are a few to start

 From New Scientist:  "if you took all the phage particles [like  
viruses] and stacked them end to end, they would reach for a total  
distance of 200 million light years."
 From dinner last night:  "if each star was a grain of sand, and you  
filled a box car with sand, and you did that for many many boxcars, it  
would take seven years of boxcars of sand passing you, one every five  
seconds, to make up the total number of stars in the universe."
 From NISE-net meetings:  "If you filled the exploratorium with rats,  
and every rat touched every other rat every second, that is how fast  
the molecules in a cell are moving."
 From Dorothy Parker:  "If you laid all the girls at Vassar end to  
end...I wouldn't be surprised."

Others?


Eric Siegel
esiegel at nyscience dot org





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