General > General Technical Chat
Examples of fast events for normal people
daqq:
Hello,
I am doing a presentation on oscilloscopes. Some of the people will not be very technically oriented or at least may have some trouble relating to things like nanoseconds or GHz. Most of the people will be programmers and embedded firmware developers, but there will also be some less electrotechnical/science oriented people present and I want them to get something out of it as well.
In a previous presentation involving measurement resolution I used a simple table where there was a weighing scale with a 10 ton range and 5 ton elephant on it connected to a voltmeter with a 3.5 to 8.5 digit resolution. For each of the resolutions I listed what could be counted using the meter - with a 3.5 digits you could count the number of dogs sitting next to the elephant, for 8.5 digits of resolution you could guess at the number of tens of flies sitting on the elephant. It was an oversimplification, got a bit slightly wrong but it made the whole thing more relatable, got some positive feedback for it.
I would like to do something similar for the sampling speed/bandwidth of oscilloscopes - basically tell what's the shortest event that they can capture (with lots of assumptions) in a normal human relatable manner. Milliseconds are reasonably doable and relatable, say, the time it takes a bullet to pass half a meter or that a sports car only moves by thiiiis tiny bit during this time. But the smaller the times get, the more I'd need to reference more hard to relate concepts (speed of light, wave propagation and similar).
I want to avoid just saying that "look! A is soooo small, now B... it's like a thousand times smaller!" or use the old trick of trying to awe the audience with a long string of zeros in front of a number.
Do you have any relatable events that take a millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond or somewhere in that area? Doesn't have to be exactly a nanosecond, 3.512 nanoseconds will do just fine. Or how would you go about illustrating to the non-technical people such things?
I've looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time) and most of the things there are hard to relate to for muggles.
Thanks,
David
bdunham7:
It takes about 10 ns for the signal to run the length of the probe cable. But perhaps comparisons to time would work better? 300ps is to one second as one second is to a century, something like that.
james_s:
Maybe a TDR demonstration? You can quite accurately measure the length of a cable by measuring the time it takes for a pulse to reflect off the other end, but if you were to for example connect an LED to one end and a battery to the other, a human would perceive the LED as responding instantly even if the cable was miles long.
CatalinaWOW:
Grace Hopper's example, that a nanosecond is a foot works well in places that remember traditional units. The metric equivalent is technically sound, but doesn't have quite the panache.
In general distances and light speed work well. Even though most people have no real grasp of the diameter of an atom or the size of a FET gate they can relate to them.
Someone:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on June 20, 2022, 09:55:36 pm ---Grace Hopper's example, that a nanosecond is a foot works well in places that remember traditional units. The metric equivalent is technically sound, but doesn't have quite the panache.
--- End quote ---
Care of the universal student ruler (30cm/12") most people in metric countries still have a common cultural reference for that length.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version