20 ms·

The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms. 1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram

The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms. 1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.

Benjammer 1y ago
Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Geee 1y ago
  Avogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
  - dhosek 1y ago
    He was obviously an alien.
  - frainfreeze 1y ago
    Aren't we all a bit weird looking? I'm more entertained that URL was already in my browser history
    - evertedsphere 1y ago
      it's hn greying out the post
    - baruz 1y ago
      Huh. It was grayed out for me as well, but I have no recollection of having had to look up moles, Avogadro, or even chemistry-related topics in Wikipedia for at least several months.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    It looks like his MIND=BLOWN, then popped and re-inflated in Theme Hospital. It just goes to show how dangerous it is to think about such big numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M
  - maratc 1y ago
    Ah, the source of "hey girls, take my number" meme.
- not_kurt_godel 1y ago
  Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    My brain says that's only 4 times as many.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - philsnow 1y ago
    Unrelated, but I moved to a more rural area a while back and I’m surrounded by orchards and fields a fair amount of time, and my mind just can’t wrap itself around the scale of agriculture. One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per year, and the orchards around here are probably around 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year. Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the parts that we eat, the tree has to put energy and mass into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories / kcal, so that’s 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5 billion calories per year per acre. 7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of 1kW. It’s incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States alone.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      1 acre is about 4,050 m^2, and incident sunlight has an average intensity of 1kW/m^2. So your avocado orchard is converting incident sunlight to food calories with an efficiency of about 0.025%. (This ... isn't wildly inefficient for photosynthesis, though typical values range from 1--3% AFAIU, though I've not computed this on a per-acre / per-hectare basis.) Mind too that you're getting more than just avocado meat, there are also the skins and pits as you note, as well as leaves and wood, all of which could be used as fuel should we really want to. Ecologists look at the net total energy conversion of ecosystems, often expressed not in terms of energy but as carbon fixation --- how much CO2 is captured from the atmosphere and converted to biomass. And that amount is ... surprisingly limited. We'll often hear that humans use only a small fraction of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface, but once you start accounting for various factors, that becomes far less comforting than it's usually intended. Three-quarters of Earth's surface is oceans (generally unsuitable for farming), plants and the biosphere require a certain amount of that activity, etc., etc. It turns out that humans already account for about 40% of net primary productivity (plant metabolism) of the biosphere. Increasing our utilisation of that is ... not likely, likely greatly disruptive, and/or both. Another interesting statistic: In 1900, just as the Model T Ford was being introduced, and local transport (that is, exclusive of inter-city rail and aquatic transport) was principally dependent on human feet or horse's hooves, twenty percent of the US grain crop went to animal feed. (And much of that ended up on city streets.) We had a biofuel-based economy, and it consumed much of our food supply. (Stats are for the US but would be typical of other countries of the time.) This isn't an argument that fossil fuels are "good", or that renewables are "bad". It does point out, however, that changing our present system is hard, and any solution will cause pain and involve compromises.
wnevets 1y ago
> The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
lovecg 1y ago
The analogy I heard was that if you take a golf ball and enlarge it to the size of the Earth, the atoms in the enlarged golf ball would be about the size of the original golf ball.
- echelon 1y ago
  Speaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of the spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E
- jstanley 1y ago
  It took me a while to understand this comment, because I imagined that scaling up a golf ball would involve creating new atoms, but what you said only makes sense if you are scaling up the individual atoms. What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth. I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller.
  - tadfisher 1y ago
    Now consider that most of that volume is empty space. Scaling up an atom such that a nucleus is the size of the Sun, you'd end up with an electron cloud about the size of the planetary solar system.
  - deepsun 1y ago
    But that comment is about atoms, while ALICE is talking about nuclei, which are way smaller than atoms. Not sure what would be the analogy there.
  - xanderlewis 1y ago
    > I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller. Me too. Perhaps what we should realise is not how big atoms are, but how small we are. I wonder if life can be sustained at larger scales. Could we have galaxy-sized lifeforms that make us look like bacteria?
chrisweekly 1y ago
Yeah. I think most ppl (incl me) lack strong intuition about things at scales outside our human day-to-day. Reminds me of a conversation about wealth, someone said "The difference between a million and a billion is... about a billion."
- cestith 1y ago
  A tenth of a percent is often a rounding error. So the difference between a million and a billion truly is about a billion. When the above isn’t enough to light a bulb, I like introduce that as analogous to pennies. 1 penny is $0.01 10 pennies is $0.1 100 pennies is $1 1,000 pennies is $10 10,000 pennies is $100 100,000 pennies is $1,000 1,000,000 pennies is $10,000 10,000,000 pennies is $100,000 100,000,000 pennies is $1,000,000 1,000,000,000 pennies is $10,000,000 Most people understand that ten million dollars is not just a different amount but a distinct kind of amount from ten thousand dollars. The powers of ten seem to become clearer with a smaller starting amount. Once they grasp the above, point out that the relationship is the same if everything starts 100 times as large. There’s also a great one out there comparing 1,000 to 1 million to 1 billion seconds, converted to years plus days.

The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms. 1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.

Benjammer 1y ago

Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Geee 1y ago
Avogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
- dhosek 1y ago
  He was obviously an alien.
- frainfreeze 1y ago
  Aren't we all a bit weird looking? I'm more entertained that URL was already in my browser history
  - evertedsphere 1y ago
    it's hn greying out the post
  - baruz 1y ago
    Huh. It was grayed out for me as well, but I have no recollection of having had to look up moles, Avogadro, or even chemistry-related topics in Wikipedia for at least several months.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  It looks like his MIND=BLOWN, then popped and re-inflated in Theme Hospital. It just goes to show how dangerous it is to think about such big numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M
- maratc 1y ago
  Ah, the source of "hey girls, take my number" meme.
not_kurt_godel 1y ago
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  My brain says that's only 4 times as many.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- philsnow 1y ago
  Unrelated, but I moved to a more rural area a while back and I’m surrounded by orchards and fields a fair amount of time, and my mind just can’t wrap itself around the scale of agriculture. One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per year, and the orchards around here are probably around 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year. Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the parts that we eat, the tree has to put energy and mass into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories / kcal, so that’s 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5 billion calories per year per acre. 7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of 1kW. It’s incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States alone.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    1 acre is about 4,050 m^2, and incident sunlight has an average intensity of 1kW/m^2. So your avocado orchard is converting incident sunlight to food calories with an efficiency of about 0.025%. (This ... isn't wildly inefficient for photosynthesis, though typical values range from 1--3% AFAIU, though I've not computed this on a per-acre / per-hectare basis.) Mind too that you're getting more than just avocado meat, there are also the skins and pits as you note, as well as leaves and wood, all of which could be used as fuel should we really want to. Ecologists look at the net total energy conversion of ecosystems, often expressed not in terms of energy but as carbon fixation --- how much CO2 is captured from the atmosphere and converted to biomass. And that amount is ... surprisingly limited. We'll often hear that humans use only a small fraction of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface, but once you start accounting for various factors, that becomes far less comforting than it's usually intended. Three-quarters of Earth's surface is oceans (generally unsuitable for farming), plants and the biosphere require a certain amount of that activity, etc., etc. It turns out that humans already account for about 40% of net primary productivity (plant metabolism) of the biosphere. Increasing our utilisation of that is ... not likely, likely greatly disruptive, and/or both. Another interesting statistic: In 1900, just as the Model T Ford was being introduced, and local transport (that is, exclusive of inter-city rail and aquatic transport) was principally dependent on human feet or horse's hooves, twenty percent of the US grain crop went to animal feed. (And much of that ended up on city streets.) We had a biofuel-based economy, and it consumed much of our food supply. (Stats are for the US but would be typical of other countries of the time.) This isn't an argument that fossil fuels are "good", or that renewables are "bad". It does point out, however, that changing our present system is hard, and any solution will cause pain and involve compromises.

wnevets 1y ago

> The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.

lovecg 1y ago

The analogy I heard was that if you take a golf ball and enlarge it to the size of the Earth, the atoms in the enlarged golf ball would be about the size of the original golf ball.

echelon 1y ago
Speaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of the spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E
jstanley 1y ago
It took me a while to understand this comment, because I imagined that scaling up a golf ball would involve creating new atoms, but what you said only makes sense if you are scaling up the individual atoms. What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth. I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller.
- tadfisher 1y ago
  Now consider that most of that volume is empty space. Scaling up an atom such that a nucleus is the size of the Sun, you'd end up with an electron cloud about the size of the planetary solar system.
- deepsun 1y ago
  But that comment is about atoms, while ALICE is talking about nuclei, which are way smaller than atoms. Not sure what would be the analogy there.
- xanderlewis 1y ago
  > I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller. Me too. Perhaps what we should realise is not how big atoms are, but how small we are. I wonder if life can be sustained at larger scales. Could we have galaxy-sized lifeforms that make us look like bacteria?

chrisweekly 1y ago

Yeah. I think most ppl (incl me) lack strong intuition about things at scales outside our human day-to-day. Reminds me of a conversation about wealth, someone said "The difference between a million and a billion is... about a billion."

cestith 1y ago
A tenth of a percent is often a rounding error. So the difference between a million and a billion truly is about a billion. When the above isn’t enough to light a bulb, I like introduce that as analogous to pennies. 1 penny is $0.01 10 pennies is $0.1 100 pennies is $1 1,000 pennies is $10 10,000 pennies is $100 100,000 pennies is $1,000 1,000,000 pennies is $10,000 10,000,000 pennies is $100,000 100,000,000 pennies is $1,000,000 1,000,000,000 pennies is $10,000,000 Most people understand that ten million dollars is not just a different amount but a distinct kind of amount from ten thousand dollars. The powers of ten seem to become clearer with a smaller starting amount. Once they grasp the above, point out that the relationship is the same if everything starts 100 times as large. There’s also a great one out there comparing 1,000 to 1 million to 1 billion seconds, converted to years plus days.