First of all, have you ever wondered about just how big our solar system is? Well, here is a scale drawing of the Earth's solar system: the first one that I've ever seen. There are some physical scale models of the solar system around the world that usually portray the Sun as being the size of a basketball and the Earth as not much bigger than a pinhead several football stadiums away. This is the first one I've seen that could (conceivably) be used for an afternoon's class activity without having to go outside. Remember: the graphics are to-scale representations of the Sun and planets, along with the distances in between them. See how many mouse-clicks it takes you just to get to Mercury... to say nothing about Saturn!
But even that one is dwarfed by this scale depiction of a hydrogen atom, which is also the very first scale picture of an atom I've seen anywhere. In chemistry or physics classes we always see a hydrogen atom being one proton with one electron and no neutrons: one big dot with a little dot going around it in circles. Until finding this page I had no idea just how inaccurate those drawings are when it comes to the distance between the proton and electron. This page advertises itself as being "the largest web page on the entire internet" and I can believe it: if your monitor size is 72 pixels to an inch, that makes this page eleven miles in length from one end of the scroll bar to the other.
These pages tell me a few things. One: that gravity is a lot stronger force than we usually realize if the Sun is keeping objects that far away from it still going in their orbits. Two: that the forces between a proton and a neutron are incredibly powerful given the distance between them and how they interact with other atoms. Three: that most of everything we know about the universe is... just empty space.
And Four: that thinking too much about stuff like this is enough to drive you completely and utterly bonkers :-)
1 comments:
THAT was fantastic!
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