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To claim that the fact that (most?) humans' lack of hardware for processing numbers with exceptionally large or small magnitudes is equivalent to the numbers no
by addaon 5y ago
To claim that the fact that (most?) humans' lack of hardware for processing numbers with exceptionally large or small magnitudes is equivalent to the numbers not meaning anything is... odd. Isn't the whole point of learning, curiosity, and even articles like this to assist us in developing our own internal software to increase understanding beyond what our naive hardware can do?
- BrandoElFollito 5y agoI do not understand. Do you know how large 50000 bacteria side to side are? I don't. I can compute the number but these are neither scales nor magnitudes I am used to. 300,000 km seems to be large but I do not know how much. About 10 times the perimeter of our planet. But this does not say much either. But when you say "five people in a room, and then two joined" you have no problems processing the numbers.
- addaon 5y agoSee, e.g., holoduke's comment in this thread. The main tool that I (I'd say "we", but I know that different folks visualize differently) have for understanding the scale of the universe is analogy. It's absolutely non-trivial to understand (grasp / grok / missing English verb) this sort of thing -- but it's absolutely possible to continue to get better at it, and to comprehend more and more as you learn and experience more and more.
- hoten 5y agoAn individual person can't point at something they don't comprehend and rightly claim it is meaningless. I'd argue the same is true in the extreme: if something can't be comprehended by _anyone_, that doesn't make it meaningless.
- klyrs 5y agoHow do people make microchips, without understanding precisely and intimately how physics works at the scale of nanometers? Just because you don't isn't proof that nobody can.