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Date: | Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:10:41 -0500 |
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The problem with these analogies (I will confess a fondness for the
rats-at-the-Exploratorium), at least when they are used in earnest,
is that they usually presume I have the ability to conceptualize
really big or really small.....Last night I was dutifully watching
Nova and a program called "Parallel Universes/Parallel Lives" about
Mark Oliver Everett, musician and son of Hugh Everett, trying to
better understand his father's theory - many worlds interpretation of
quantum physics - as a means of discovering a man he didn't know very
well in life.
One of Hugh Everett's colleagues was trying to explain some the
concepts - and the narrator says of a pencil dot the colleague has
just made, there are more atoms in that single dot than there are
pencils in the world......great comparison but the problem is how on
earth can I conceive of such a large number of pencils? Put all
together, would these pencils stack to the moon and back? Would you
be able to build the Eiffel Tower with them?
When one mixes orders of orders of magnitude - it is very difficult
for most of us to visualize in a meaningful way...
(By the way...if you stacked a million nickels they would be taller
than 5 Sears Towers stacked on top of each other (without the radio
antennas)....
Before I end, let me say I enjoy thinking about such things, its just
that most of the time, I don't 'get' it.....
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