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very small scales

  • 26-09-2012 8:09pm
    #1
    blatherskite
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 38 ✭


    We all think of nanoseconds being really short amounts of time or attometres being tiny distances, but surely from an objective point of view, these type of scales are the standard for the universe and the scales on which we operate are just what we've evolved to think is the standard and are in fact arbitrary? So is it possible that planck scale physics is the "real" standard scale physics and that newtonian physics is just what happens when phenomena at these levels are aggregated and scaled up? Should physicists always try to look at things from un-human scales of time, distant etc. without seeing them as fast, small, weak and work upwards? does this make any sense?!


Comments

  • #2
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 93,567 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    At small scales quantum effects dominate so you can never be sure of what's going on.

    You have to work in K space and that's not easy to visualise. Forget Euclid, this stuff starts off with inverse dimensions and pretty soon you are chasing Alice down the rabbit hole.



    At large scales things are more definite since things statistically balance out. And we can visualise stuff easily.


    BTW
    nanoseconds are not small units of time. A 3.5 GHz CPU will use both leading and falling edges of it's clock and so it's taken 7 steps in that time.

    If you want RTE by satellite then you are up at 20.185GHz


  • #3
    Gurgle
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,064 ✭✭✭Gurgle


    blatherskite wrote: »
    Should physicists always try to look at things from un-human scales of time, distant etc. without seeing them as fast, small, weak and work upwards? does this make any sense?!
    Yes, and that's exactly what they do.
    Fast, small, weak etc are all relative terms. They don't convey any absolute meaning, and so don't have any place in physics except in comparisons.

    There is no conflict with the scale of SI units compared to the scale where particle interactions happen, or the scale of galactic interactions; we've a whole range of scale adjusting prefixes.

    Anyone who lives in the modern world knows the range from nano to Giga, thanks to their phones and computers. Anyone in a physics related dicipline can stretch that range from femto to Peta without having to go look up the meaning.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix


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