EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Emergence of Life
Bruce W. Fouke, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E Order of Magnitude in the Sciences Notes taken on November 28, 2015 by Edward Tanguay |
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the concept of scale
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a common hurdle in understanding the universe
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two dimensions
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spatial
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how large or how small is something
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temporal
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how long ago or how far in the future something is
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how to do handle the broad scales that we have to deal with for these two dimensions
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realize that when studying the world and our universe, spatial and temporal scales are vast
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we are used to understand most things in our lives as how big they are in relation to our human bodies
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a tree is three times as high as someone
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a child is half the size of an adult
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the average diameter of a bacteria is one micron
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one millionth of a meter
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we have the same time with temporal measurements
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we usually measure things in relation to the length of a human life
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cells divide within seconds
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chemical reactions are a fraction of a second
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the age of the earth, 4.7 billion years
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consider a critical conceptual benchmark
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is something 10 times larger or 10 times smaller
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is something 100 times larger or 100 times smaller
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something that is twice as big as something is interesting, but something that is ten times as big as something else is fundamentally different
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we can put objects in the universe into a ten by ten basis
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exponential notation
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how many zeros come after a number
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if something that is 1000 times larger than something else is 3 powers of ten greater
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when something is 2 times the power of 10 smaller, it is 100 times smaller
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one power of ten is one order of magnitude
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average child is one meter tall
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how does the fit into the measurement of a kilometer high mountain
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the mountain is 3 powers of 10 larger than the child, or 3 orders of magnitude larger