3 ms·
It's representative of the average person's inability to judge scale at the extremes. As a random person on the street which is bigger and by how much: an atom
by jballanc 17y ago
It's representative of the average person's inability to judge scale at the extremes. As a random person on the street which is bigger and by how much: an atom or a transistor in their iPod? It's the same with the very large/powerful. The average person thinks, "A nuclear bomb is big and a hurricane is big, ipso facto." It's hard to comprehend just how much more powerful a hurricane is than a nuke!
- iron_ball 17y agoWait, I can understand if people don't get it right even to within a few orders of magnitude -- I know I couldn't -- but don't people know that an atom is a gatrillion times smaller than anything visible with the naked eye? High school science can't be THAT bad.
- kragen 17y agoThe transistors in your iPod are also a gatrillion times smaller than anything visible with the naked eye. If one of them is 100 nanometers square (assuming a 30nm process — anybody know if 3λ is about right for a transistor?), that's 4× less than a wavelength of light. Your visual resolution might go down to 10 000 nanometers or so, which means that in the space of the smallest dot you can see, you can fit on the order of ten thousand transistors. (More than you'll find in an 8080 or 6502.)