Orders of Magnitude

... And the million years thing got me thinking about orders of magnitude in my life...
Not sure why but these were some of my "range of experiences", from very broad to very narrow. :)

I thought about time again, and in my personal life experiences I found that I have really quite a surprising number of orders of magnitude in this area of personal experience.
My largest time experience is of course my whole life at about 45 years. Which in seconds is about 1.4 x 10e9 seconds
On the other end of the scale, in my electrical engineering role, I was quite regularly looking at signals on an oscilloscope or designing logic circuits with critical time intervals way down in the pico-second range... Thats 1 x 10e-12
So thats a very broad range of time experiences covering 21 orders of magnitude!

And just to give you some idea of how small an amount of time that is... In one pico second, light which travels at 3 x 10e8 m/s (unimaginably fast compared to most of our "real world" experiences) has covered the tiny distance of about 3cm (or just over an inch for the US folk!)... Thats a very small fraction of time that we can easily measure in any electronic engineering lab!

And I thought about distance...
And my largest distance experience would have to be all the riding of the motorbike that Ive been doing in the last two or three years... Ive personally put over 130,000 Km on my motorbike, and Ive been paying attention for every single one of those Km as it passed under the bikes wheels! (which is 1.3 x 10e8 metres).
And at the other end of the scale, again working as an electrical engineer, Ive spent time probing and debugging silicon chips with feature sizes below 1 miocron... Thats 1 x 10e-6 metres.
So the range is 14 orders of magnitude!

On the speed front, its much smaller with my personal top speed of only about 230Kmh on a motorbike (Note, I dont count flying in jet planes because Im not actually doing it... Im just along for the ride, and Im incredibly insulated from the actual experience.) and in base units, thats only 2.3 x 10e5 m/s or 5 orders of magnitude.

... And a side note here is that as I mentioned, I currently seem to have a sort of "Stockholm Syndrome" with motorbikes, and Ive been having quite strong urges to buy and rework a motorbike and then personally ride it (on a salt lake) to 200mph (320Kmh)
... I dont know why... I do know it would scare the living daylights out of me and I also know that its not too hard to make a bike that can do it...We will wait and see if I take the project on or not I guess :)))

And on temperature its very limited too with a highest personally experienced "whole body" temperature of about 48 degC outside in a desert somewhere.
I could count the boiling water spills (100degC), or the molten lava I got close to I suppose at about 900 degC or propane gas flames (2200degC) etc; Or even the sunlight from the surface of the sun at about 5500 degC, but I think the "whole body"aspect is right for this case :)
At the other extreme (on the coldness front rather than the smallest measure of temperature like the others), is only about -27 or -30 degC while mountaineering... Despite my having spent a good deal of time working in Antarctica ... but only during the Summers. (lots of places have regular low temperatures below -40 degC and the coldest recorded in the world was about -90 degC in the inland of Antarctica.)... And thats less than 3 orders of magnitude!


Like I say, not sure why that all went through my mind... But it did, so I shared it.