Talk:Orders of magnitude (length)
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[edit] Examples moved from metre article
- Megametre
- The Earth's polar circumference is 40.01 Mm.
- The distance from Amsterdam to Bordeaux is approximately 1 Mm.
- The Earth's equatorial diameter is 12.76 Mm.
- Gigametre
- Exametre
- the distance to Betelgeuse is 4 Em
- light travels the distance of 1 Em in 105.7 years
- Petametre
- the distance from the Sun to Proxima Centauri is 40 Pm
- the distance from the Sun to Sirius is 81 Pm
- light travels the distance of 1 Pm in 39 days
- Terametre
- Yottametre
- diameter of the Local Supercluster is 2 Ym
- distance to the farthest known quasar is 265 Ym
- distance to the cosmic light horizon is 440 Ym
- Zettametre
- the diameter of our galaxy is about 1.0 Zm
- distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud is 1.6 Zm
- distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is 22.3 Zm
- Nanometre
- 1.1 nm — diameter of a single-walled carbon nanotube
- 2 nm — diameter of DNA helix
- Micrometre
- 1.55 µm — wavelength of light used in optical fibre
- 6 µm — anthrax spore
- 6-8 µm — diameter of a human red blood cell
- 7 µm — width of strand of spider web [1]
- 1-10 µm — diameter of typical bacterium
- about 10 µm — size of a fog, mist or cloud water droplet
- Femtometre
[edit] millimetre redirect
Hi,
I post this here, since I reckon the odds of anyone reading my message will be higher here than on the millimetre talk page.
Now here is the question: can anyone tell me why millimetre does not redirect to metre? I was looking here following the suggestion to merge the articles on arcsecond, arcminute and maybe even degree (see arcminute talk page), since the former two are both subdivisions of the latter. My thought was that if there is a convention on Wikipedia on redirection of subdivision of units, at least keywords like millimetre would comply.
MHD 10:06, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Error?
Is the value correctly stated for "wavelength of the lowest UHF and highest VHF radio frequency, 300 MHz"?
--Richard Ong 06:13, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
"average width of human hair (ranges from 18 to 180 µm)"
Does that not make it 99 µm, rather than 80?
--Thangalin 13:00, 27 Sep 2006 (PST)
- No. You're assuming that the distribution is symmetric about the average. The frequency could fall off faster in one direction than the other. --Strait 20:14, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Possible merger
There are many pages such as 1 E20 m which are basically covered by this page. Shouldn't they be merged? --PhiJ 17:43, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
- Oppose merger, separate pages allow more examples and give you better idea of the scales of the Universe. Additional material like diagrams could be included in these articles.--Jyril 19:19, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
- oppose — Merging all those examples into one page would make for a terribly cluttered page. Getting rid of the examples is not a good option, either, since the examples are a good way to give people a sense of scale, even if they don't recognize all of the examples. One-dimensional Tangent (Talk) 22:16, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
- oppose — The challenge is we want to show various views of the data set. Different breadths of scale, and different topical emphases. There is no catch-all view - different views clarify and obscure different things. Right now we have the way too long to see the whole picture Orders of magnitude (length), the assorted peephole 1Enn pages (great for accumulating facts, less good for providing context), and unassociated topical pages (eg, Grain size for small non-"astronomical" rocks). What's needed is not fewer tables, but more. A brief several oom per line, a readable one line per oom, etc. Anon 17:00, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Many pages link to specific 1Enn pages. Eg, Special:Whatlinkshere/1_E4_m. So Orders of magnitude (length) would need id= tags Help:Anchors added to support this, no? So the redirects can do the right thing?
Some of the 1Enn pages are just lists of factoids, and look like Orders of magnitude (length) excerpts (eg 1 E-9 m). But others provide interesting categorization (eg 1 E0 m) or discussion. Perhaps the former should be merged and the latter not? Are the ones with other content contiguous?
How does this all evolve? Would 1 E-9 m be un-merged if someone was ready to enhance it like 1 E0 m?
It seems this has been discussed in the past [[2]].
Well, I'll remove the merge tags, and maybe try to do the suggestions some time, if/when I get the time. --PhiJ 18:31, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Ideas for additional tables
| 10x m | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| itsy bitsy | ... | |||
| -15 | atoms | parts of (subatomic) | electron, proton, neutron | |
| -12 | atomic | hydrogen, oxygen, molecules | ||
| -9 | tiny | nanometres | protein, integrated circuit, virus | |
| -6 | microscopic | bacteria, cell, sand | ||
| -3 | familiar | millimetres & inches |
|
|
| 0 | metres & yards | |||
| 3 | kilometres & miles | |||
| astronomy | 6 | solar system | planets | Continents, Ceres, Earth, Jupiter |
| 9 | orbits | Sun, orbits of the inner planets | ||
| 12 | orbits of the outer planets; heliosheath | |||
| 15 | galaxy (Milky Way) | light year; parsec | distance to the stars | |
| 18 | kpc | Local Bubble, galactic arms | ||
| 21 | Universe | million light years | Large-scale structure of the cosmos | |
| 24 |
Derived from How Big Are Things?.
[edit] Links to 1 Ex m pages
I think we need links on this page to pages like 1 E11 m, but where do we put them. I was thinking that we could put them where it says 1011m, but I thought I'd try to get consensus before going ahead. --PhiJ 16:30, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] suggestion for additional article
In my opinion it would be useful and interesting to add an additional feature to this page. Or, alternatively, another article if this one would become too crowded (likely). To get an even better idea of some of the enormous scales involved, we could add comparisons with known/imaginable entities. I already added something like this for the 'lightyear' (the time it would take voyager to cover such a distance), and I also added some distances covered by running/cycling/automobile races which accomplishes the same, but it could be expanded further.
Like, how long for a hypothetical airliner flying to the sun? Or how long would it take to walk around the earth? JH-man 19:35, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
DO IT! DO IT!! and if you don't do it here, tell me where I can find such a table! Sys Hax 01:33, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
- I've never created an article from scratch and I'm not sure I would be good at it. ButI would certainly try to contribute if someone started one. JH-man 09:00, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] New Jersey State Highway 59
SPUI, I have no idea why removing this entry is so important to you? Neither is it to me, but each time you head-over-heals remove it, you destroy the layout of the table as well! Not an example of carefulness...
You say it's not the shortest highway. If that's your reason, then replace it by the shortest one instead of scrapping it.
If you think something like the "shortest highway" deserves no mention in this list, then at least say so. Personally, I think this kind of 'trivia' has its place here. It gives it a lighter touch. Let's deal with this like grown-ups. --JH-man 16:30, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
I have no idea what the shortest highway is. Route 59 is just a random short road that someone decided to add for the hell of it. --SPUI (T - C) 15:47, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Removed depth Titanic
I corrected two rowspan-errors. One by adding one row, one by simply removing the new entry. I really don't think the depth of the Titanic in the ocean is relevant enough in this list... In a way, this 'sense of scale' is already covered in the list by mentioning the deepest part of the ocean. This is both a 'record', and relates to a fundamental sense of scale of the earth. This in itself wouldn't be reason enough, but it is also a very 'invisible' quantity. People can not check out the depth of the Titanic with their own eyes, so as a comparison it is quite useless.
I am happy that you agree about the usefulness of a 'comparison'-page, though ;-)
JH-man 09:00, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Insert...
...obvious penis joke.
[edit] Exameter
For the blank spot on Exameter, how about the distance to some stars with extrasolar planets, such as 79 Ceti or HD 209458, or the diameter of a typical globular cluster? --LRG 00:24, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
- Sounds good. Distances to the nearest known extrasolar planet, distance to the nearest known earth-like extrasolar planet and/or nearest planet with properties suitable for life-as-we-know-it? I'd say go ahead... JH-man 07:40, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Linking to units
Should we remove the links to unit names such as petameter and exameter since they just forward to metre? --LRG 00:24, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Full stop vs. commas
I attempted to standardize the use of commas and periods in this article for the sake of consistency, but my edits were reverted. As it stands, the article is very confusing because there is no agreed upon use of commas vs. periods to indicate thousands and millions as opposed to tenths, thousandths, etc. I don't care which is used, but I do think the article suffers from a lack of clarity until this is standardized. X3210 (talk) 05:28, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
- Regardless of your honorable intentions, your edits were reverted because they introduced thousand-fold errors. It seems to me such a "standardization" as you propose could easily lead to a worse lack of clarity. As the table is presently set up, the units change every decade, or every few decades, as indicated in the "Multiple" column. The values appear to be expressed in the conventional way for each range. Sometimes that involves multiples and sometimes fractions. I can see that that might lead to some confusion. However, attempting to "improve" the scheme would probably make matters worse. Please let's not fix it if it ain't broke. I doubt there would be a consensus for change. Perhaps we will hear from others on this. Hertz1888 (talk) 05:58, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
