How big is the Pitrpod Zepto?

December 22, 2005 7:23 PM

I want to develop an education curriculum to teach kids (smart 9th graders to adults) about scale. That is, I want people to realize exactly how small things like atoms, photolithographed conduits and electrons are, and how large galaxies are.

I've seen Powers of 10 both in video form, and on the web. I think its useful in learning this sort of thing, but it doesn't really capture how amazingly small things can be.

One thing my little (12-year-old) brother suggested was breathing out on a cold day. You can sort of see the fog as little water dots.

Any ideas?

posted by arrhn to education (13 comments total)

Get a good stereo microscope, these things are amazing. The Vienna museum of natural history has samples set up for viewing, and the 3D aspect really draws people in.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:37 PM on December 22, 2005

Does playing Katamari Damacy count?
posted by matildaben at 8:47 PM on December 22, 2005

Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten (via Google Video).
posted by mrbill at 9:00 PM on December 22, 2005

arrrggh, nevermind. I'm a moron.
posted by mrbill at 9:01 PM on December 22, 2005

Using real-life objects and lengths like oranges, soccer fields and such can be very effective. Like, "if this orange was a nucleus, the electrons around it would be as far away as the courthouse in the town next door" (or whatever it would be). Shouldn't be too difficult to get the ratios right so kids could easily grok the scale.
posted by mediareport at 9:16 PM on December 22, 2005

After four decades of pioneering work, Admiral Hopper felt her greatest contribution had been "all the young people I've trained." She was an inspirational professor and a much sought-after speaker, in some years she addressed more than 200 audiences. In her speeches Admiral Hopper often used analogies and examples that have become legendary. Once she presented a piece of wire about a foot long, and explained that it represented a nanosecond, since it was the maximum distance electricity could travel in wire in one-billionth of a second. She often contrasted this nanosecond with a microsecond - a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long - as she encouraged programmers not to waste even a microsecond. - via
posted by phrontist at 9:21 PM on December 22, 2005

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
posted by The White Hat at 9:59 PM on December 22, 2005

If my rough calculations are correct, the smallest yardstick (3.7 megaparsec) in the most zoomed-in picture is about 120 times the diameter of the milky way.

Millennium Simulation.

The simulation is only a fraction of the theoretical size of the universe. The universe is big enough that most people are unable to grasp just exactly how big it is. I get nightmares whenever I even try to contemplate it.

DNA in Lego - if you can figure out the scale of how many times bigger than real DNA a Lego DNA helix is (we've got about 3 billion basepairs of DNA in each of our cells) compared to real DNA (ie., how big would you be if each bit of your DNA was the size of the LEGO blocks?)...

There's also the good-ol' solarsystem w/ fruit laid out in the schoolyard demo (how many times smaller would you be compared to this smaller speck of sand if the Earth was the size of a cherry?)...
posted by PurplePorpoise at 10:31 PM on December 22, 2005

Fantastic Book of Comparisons

I always thought this book was brilliant when I was a kid.
posted by frogan at 11:16 PM on December 22, 2005

A nice graphic
posted by leapingsheep at 3:29 AM on December 23, 2005

I really enjoyed the size comparisons that Bill Bryson gives in his "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Here's one example:

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and pluto would be about a mile and a half distant (and the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.
posted by I Love Tacos at 6:21 AM on December 23, 2005

When you have decided upon your scale example, you might want to include the student in the example to kick it off. That roots the concept of scale to something that they are intimately familiar with (their own size).

So, if your whole body were the size of this school (or tree or whatever), what would represent the size of your hand only? Any what would represent the size of the distal phalange of your pinky finger? And what would represent the size of a cell?
posted by jeanmari at 7:19 AM on December 23, 2005

At a school I worked at, the Earth Science teacher had her students make placards for each of the major bodies in the solar system and set them up on the main drag coming into town, roughly to distance (but not size) scale. The sun was on the side of a barn.

It was a nice project that involved the town, and other than Uranus wandering around (Ah, the mentality of drunk seniors with a pickup truck "Ha-ha! Get it? Your Anus is on your lawn!") it was a nice way to make the town more aware of what was going on in the school. Plus it's a decent interdisciplinary project, which is nice if your school is into that.
posted by plinth at 8:15 AM on December 23, 2005