General > General Technical Chat

Examples of fast events for normal people

<< < (6/7) > >>

RoGeorge:

--- Quote from: daqq on June 21, 2022, 08:46:50 pm ---"one nanosecond is to a second what a second is to a century"*
...
* - I'll use the proper numbers, don't worry :)

--- End quote ---

That's a good analogy, thought it's rather 30 years than 100.  An average century is 3,155,695,200 seconds, briefly said π∗109  :P.

Another funny one about "nano", hair grows about 4nm each second, and having to wait till it grows 4m long...

Peter Taylor:
My hair is very long. It took a very long time to grow it; using the hair analogy.  :)

SiliconWizard:
Should be fun looking at hair growing in almost "real time" using an electron microscope.

ve7xen:

--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on June 21, 2022, 08:09:06 pm ---The explosion front for even fast high explosives only travels a few thousand meters per second, so even the fastest physical events can't get far into the sub-millisecond time frame.  And even that has the flaw that few people are really familiar with this type of event.

I think we are stuck with EM wave propagation for really short time intervals.

--- End quote ---

Counterpoint - quartz oscillators and SAW filters are built well into the 100s of MHz, and are based on a (fairly) macro physical phenomenon. Similarly, there are also MEMS devices that operate in the MHz. I find this pretty crazy, myself.

I think audio does an alright job of bridging this gap, in the context of scopes. Most people have a reasonable fundamental understanding of sound and how quickly the waves are alternating from their experiences with low frequency sound, and at high-ish frequencies, it's below 1ms. Something like playing a 50Hz sound and showing the waveform at a human-ish timescale (maybe like 0.5s across the screen), then ramping that up until it's unintelligible on screen, and zooming back in can get the 'point' across.

Examples based on the speed of light 'an ns per ft' do more to drive home how fast the speed of light really is, but not sure they help understanding time. As far as we experience in our daily lives, the speed of light may as well be infinite. So it's impressive that a scope can measure it, but doesn't really connect with intuitive understanding, I reckon.

RJSV:
   A musical and audio science background helps.  Maybe you could say as an example, of two different realms, the first being around 30 milliseconds.  That, at speed of sound, represents a moderate distance.
Going smaller, relative to 30 mSec, try and explain that slap-back sound (see title Rock Roll Music, 1970s).
Explain the Slap-back starts to get smaller than perception, at a few mSec.  A 'quick' hands together slap could take 40 to 100 mSec.
Explain that those example, speed of sound, use approx 980 ft per sec, or a bit slower, than 1 mSec so, a bit less than 1 foot in a 1 mSec time.
THEN, you explain, you want to relate that (speed) to electrical 'speed', ...at approx. 1.5 BILLION TIMEs faster. 
   Heck, at that point, I'd lay it all out, onto the (desk) of the listener.  "Tell you what..." you'd say:
   "Can anybody here relate, that 1.5 BILLION difference in rates of travel, between light/radio waves, and acoustic waves here at sea level?"
   In other words, let the STUDENTs struggle, to explain, to the less advanced, what is 1.5 Billion times factor different...  The ideas, of vastly different quantify-able speeds, almost supercedes the topic...lol

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod