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Date: | Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:17:53 -0400 |
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I too enjoy these also but wonder if our visitors or the general
public get it. Anyone know?
Martin
On Oct 22, 2008, at 12:10 PM, Jeff Courtman wrote:
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology
> Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
>
> 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.....
>
____________________________________
Martin Weiss, PhD
Science Interpretation, Consultant
New York Hall of Science
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