quinta-feira, 31 de outubro de 2024

Scale issue

Scale issue

In Mathematics, and especially in Physics, we come across the dimension process that is methodically treated in scales, within each scope, we can mainly come across the biggest problem still unresolved politically between the two countries and the rest of the world that struggle to culturally accommodate the same scales used by the rest of the 194 countries.

Only the United States of North America and Liberia officially and culturally use the measures of capacity, dimension and dynamics based on medieval and British monarchical customs represented in divisions of inches, miles, pounds, ounces, which have already caused two major technological accidents due to the confusion between the dimensions of centimeters and inches, one of them precisely in the first inaugural launch of the first rocket called Ariane, which today is a commercial success of the European satellite launch consortium that, because of the mix of English and French engineers, did not realize that part of the software mixed centimeters with inches, resulting in the self-destruction of the rocket worth millions of dollars, francs, euros.

When a pilot confuses gallons with liters or tons of fuel with pounds when refueling an aircraft, the difference between a 3.7-liter gallon and a thousand-pound ton can cause a dry run and bring down an aircraft. This is very serious.

It is not easy to eliminate discrepancies and divergences, differences since a North American citizen cannot psychologically understand the difference between being in a car at 60 miles per hour and being informed of the speed of 100 kilometers per hour.

For physicists, there are two very distinct dimensions: the world of nanometers, picometers, and the world of light years, parsecs.

These worlds are at opposite ends of the scale: billionths of meters and billions of meters.

Just as a North American driver does not understand sensorially in his cognitive sensitivity what it would be like to travel at 100 kilometers per hour, and cannot say whether it is slow or fast, he would understand very well if he were told that it is 60 miles per hour.

These cultural references are quite subjective. For us humans, the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is an infinite space; we could never travel from one end of our small galaxy to the other.

When we talk about infinite time, it is enough for us to think of 10,000 years, and in terms of distance, the star Betelgeuse, visible in the sky, located 800 light years away, is in practice infinite.

We have been led to believe that we need to think of 13.4 billion years as the beginning of the universe; no human being can count numbers from one to one up to a billion; the question of dimension needs to be put in truly human terms, within certain human limitations: let's see.

All the wealth produced by humanity per year can be counted and measured in 112 trillion dollars; the total production of automobiles in one year throughout the world is 100 million automobiles; the population of the earth is 7.5 billion human beings; we know the weight and size of the earth, its orbital speed and rotation speed; step by step we are reaching the knowable limits for humans to understand the universe; The rest is just mathematical and statistical speculation. We can calculate the entire mass of the known universe, by estimation, and therefore the amount of matter existing in the entire known universe, we did this through approximate calculations from astrophysics. For us humans, our solar system is enough as our physical limit; think that the most distant planet needs nine years of space travel by the most powerful rockets to be reached; to go to our sun we need a 6-month trip to be reached by a satellite launched from Earth; the highest speed reached by a man-made vehicle was reached by the satellite placed near the sun, attracted by the gravitational force of the sun reaching 700 thousand kilometers per hour at perigee. All this to say that for our Physics it makes no difference on the scale of the universe, whether the Big Bang happened 13.4 billion years ago or 48 billion years ago, our limit of cognition and sensitivity does not go beyond our solar system, from here we will never leave, like the North American driver who cannot imagine his car going at 100 kilometers per hour, but is able to perceive that 60 miles per hour is a high speed that requires a lot of attention on the steering wheel of his car, for an aircraft this same speed is like being stopped, and for a ship it is very fast and dangerous, like riding a bicycle at this same speed: it all depends on the scale.

A hundred years of life for a human being is a challenge to survival in the same way as 100 million years for a rock that is already beginning to show cracks and signs of time passing.


Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político

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