Now concentrate.Īs you see the houses, neighborhood, country and planet imagine us at each others' throats, beating and killing our fellow humans. Then run auto, and have it go backwards towards the "bigger picture". It's just that they've been through the exhibit. It's not that they're mentally ill or homeless. This helps to explain why there are so many weirdos in NYC. Perhaps you've seen me or many of my other museum visitors. I now drive a bus for a living and talk quietly to myself. It was at that point that I realized that matter truly does equal energy, and that even matter is mostly empty space, but nanoseconds later my brain imploded. If you survive that, they get closer and closer to 1:1 size, then they move inwards and say things like "If the sphere is the size of a hydrogen atom, this speck is the size of the nucleus." They'll say things like (paraphrased) "If the sphere is the size of the known universe, then this teeny tiny speck is the galaxy you live in." Around the sphere is a walkway with exhibits where they compare various sizes to the sphere.Īt first, it's like the Total Perspective Vortex. Well actually I don't recommend it, because it can cause your brain to implode.Īt New York's Museum of Nat'l History there is an exhibit centered around a two-story-tall sphere. A similar calculation for the DNA strands at 10^-9 m gives an approximately 124 eV photon energy, which is also sufficient to ionize some of the molecules you may be able to get a picture, but it will be a very hazy one (the best electron microscopy has been able to just barely make out the double helix structure of DNA). A similar attempt to view an atom would require a photon wavelength of 1 angstrom, a wavelength of about 10^18 Hz, and a photon energy of about 12 keV, quite enough to completely ionize the atom and strip away all of its electrons, leaving you with nothing to see. I guess this is probably enough energy to turn the proton into something else entirely even before you could see it. This gives a photon energy of roughly 2.5 GeV, which is comparable to the energies generated at the Fermilab or CERN particle accelerators. Besides, to actually "see" anything amounts to measuring the position and velocity of an object to as high an accuracy as the size of the object, so the Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes it impossible to see anything so small.Īn attempt to actually zoom into a proton to see it using high-energy gamma ray photons would require a photon wavelength of less than 1 fm, or about 10^23 Hz. We can really only infer their existence from their indirect effects, which is the only way we know any of them are real. Quantum objects like molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles will always be "invisible", as they are all much, much smaller than a wavelength of visible light, which is what we really define vision as. As you'll see in the Bits and Bytes section, there is also some confusion with k and K when dealing with the binary (base 2) prefixes.The short answer is, I guess, you can't. * Note: Since the upper case 'K' was already used to describe Kelvins, a lower case 'k' was chosen to represent the prefix kilo. As an example, one mW (milliwatt) does not equal one MW (megawatt). This allows you to distinguish between the two when they use the same letter. One thing to notice about the prefixes for small values, is that their shorthand notations are all lower case while the large number prefixes are upper case (with the exception of kilo-*, hecto- and deca-). Now, instead one trillionth of a second, it can be referred to as a picosecond. There are also prefixes for helping communicate tiny numbers as well. This allows us to describe incredibly large numbers of units succinctly. Instead of saying 3,200,000,000 Hertz, you can say 3.2 GigaHertz, or 3.2 GHz for shorthand written notation. These above prefixes dramatically help describe quanities of units in large amounts. While these prefixes cover a rang of 10 -3 to 10 3, many electronic values can have a much larger range. However, as you'll soon see, when learning about electronics and computer science, the range of prefixes well exceeds the standard six. You may have even learned a fun mnemonic to go along with these such as Kangaroos Have Dirty Underwear During Cold Months. These are what we'll consider the standard six prefixes taught in most High School science courses. When first learning about metric prefixes, chances are you were taught these six prefixes first: Prefix (Symbol) Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Pin It The Prefixes
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