From the proton to the universe; Cool flash file which has a "scale of the universe"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Delirious
  • 3 comments
  • 535 views
Pretty cool. Showed this to my oldest, and he loved it.

I was disappointed in not seeing an electron represented, though. I'm fascinated by them.
 
whoa....

EDIT: How old is this thing? It lists Pluto as a planet still.
 
Nice find 👍

You can do a similar thing with timescales, to give you a more tangible sense of geological time. We often use terms like "millions of years ago" as if we really appreciate what that means, and distances (in time) just roll off the tongue with hardly a second thought... But if you were to convert time to physical distance, you start to get a better feel for it...

Take 1 mm (0.1 cm/0.001 m) to represent 10 years. My whole life would measure just 3.3 mm long, or one third of a centimetre. My late grandfather was born less than 1 cm ago. The limit of my knowledge of my own family extends back to about 200 years, or just 2 cm on my scale. Jesus Christ walked the Earth just 20 cm ago, less than one foot, and the whole of modern human civilisation since the end of the last ice age is represented by just one meter long stick (10000 years)...

Modern humans appeared about 10-20 m ago, or the distance from your front door to your back door, but the distance back to the most recent common ancestor of humans to another extant species (chimpanzees) is a whopping 5 km away! 13 times further back than that, 65 million years ago, or 65 kilometers on my scale, the last dinosaurs were around, and the first dinosaurs appeared about 4 times further back than that... Multicellular organisms appeared atleast 1 billion years ago, or 1000 km on this scale, and life first originated almost 4 billion years ago, or roughly the distance between New York and San Francisco... and the known universe is atleast 3 times older than that...
 
Back