The Distances Between Things
Why I find this topic interesting I don’t really know. I only know that I do. There are many ways to measure and document the distance between two things, and they mostly depend on how big or small the things are (as compared to our physical bodies).
When you have a unit of distance that is based on a known physical thing and easily scalable by powers of 10 (which the world does have, the meter, by which I mean the world outside of Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S., a topic I intend to explore in a future post), you pretty much have the ability to measure anything, no matter how big or how small. But when you start talking about very big or very small distances (compared to our physical bodies) the numbers can be a little laborious to express. For example, the distance from Earth to the Sun is about 150 billion meters or 149,597,870,000 meters. The radius of an atom’s nucleus, meanwhile, is about one quadrillionth of a meter or 1/1,000,000,000,000,000 meter.
Those numbers start to contain a lot of digits or scientific notation when they are placed in meters, so we’ve come up with different ways of expressing them. For outer space we’ve come up with the light-year, i.e. the distance light can travel in one Earth year. For tiny atomic measurements we’ve named the femtometer (the one-quadrillionth meter measurement discussed above) as the standard, and started expressing those little distances in fm rather than m.
As we explore more of both outer space and the smallest regions within an atom, it will be interesting to see what units of measure are invented to express those distances. Here endeth the lesson on the distances between things.
Bike Newbie 