Mag World: Developing an Intuitive Sense of Scale for Life and the Universe
I created Mag World to help you grasp the true magnitude of numbers, moving beyond simple comparisons to understand exactly how much bigger or smaller things are. We use a simplified notation to build fluency in scale, applying it to everything from daily life to the cosmos. You can now explore our podcast or install a browser plugin for Firefox and Chrome to instantly convert webpage numbers into our intuitive Mag World units.
Mag World is an effort to develop an intuitive sense of scale--not just 'bigger' or 'smaller', but how much bigger, and how much smaller.
- d--b
While it is easier to think of large numbers in terms of logarithms, cause it makes unfathomly large numbers much more palatable, I disagree that it makes scales more intuitive.
1 billion is a very large number, and thinking of it as 10^9 make it seem smaller.
1 trillion is "just" 3 orders of magnitude above 1 billion, and "only" 9 orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms in a mole.
I don't know the answer to making the mind understand scale. I don't think things like "it 's about 2000 football pitches" help either. I don't think "a billion is the number of cubic milimeter in a cubic meter" work either. I don't think the logarithm based "zoom visualization" work either. I just think the brain just cannot picture what those numbers mean. We're not wired to understand those things very well, just as we aren't wired to work with 4+ dimensions
- Diogenesian
This scale sometimes goes to 11, for example the size of the solar system is ↑11 meters, but even the size of the entire universe is only ↑27 meters. Which should indicate both how “universal” this scale is, and also how big the universe is!
This feels like the problem of understanding scale gets pushed around syntactically without actually aiding understanding.
"Got it, so the universe is 3x bigger than the solar system."
"No no, remember these are base 10 logarithms."
"Ah... so it's 16x!"
"No, 10^16x."
"Ah... so it's totally incomprehensible."
- amelius
Reminds me of the work of Neal Agarwal, e.g.:
https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
https://neal.fun/size-of-life/