The writing challenge of scale

How many times have you heard the weather channel report “dime-sized hail” or even for some unlucky place, “golf-ball sized hail”?  Writers of both fiction and non-fiction struggle to explain situations and events to their readers, and scale is often a problem.  We are bombarded with facts from the nano-small to the mega-big, from the microscopic to the telescopic.  Comparison with the known helps.    Sport comparisons are common, like the leaking oil tanker Exxon Valdez being twice the length of a football field.  But many analogies don’t help.  I’ve just read that a T. rex dinosaur could bite with a pressure equal to 13 Steinway Model D concert grand pianos!  There, now you know exactly what it would feel like to get chomped on by that big dinosaur.  I liked the specificity of this one, even though I don’t know anything about a Model D Steinway, or even if there is a Model C and whether it’s bigger or smaller.  What about small items?  Human hair is popular, and so often I’ve read something described as “half the thickness of a human hair”.

            Then there’s “Twice the distance to the moon.”  I enjoy the romance of looking at the Moon, but I really have no feel for how far away it is, so to tell me something is twice the distance doesn’t help.  Now if a writer says the distance is the same as from New York to Los Angeles, then I have a feel for that.  Same with the height of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty—but “ten times the height of the Empire State Building” is getting away from me.

            Time can be particularly difficult to imagine.  How do you come to grips with “a million years”, or “a hundred million years,” or the age of the universe which is 13.7 billion years (with a ‘B’)?  One description I liked is to think of the time of life on earth as a thousand page book, so it’s representing roughly 3000 million years.  Then humans would have appeared three million years ago and shown up on page 1000!  And the history of homo sapiens would be written in roughly the last 50 words.  So much for “three-score years and ten”.

            At the other extreme, a radioactive element like copernicium-277 decays (half-life) in 240 millionths of a second, difficult even for scientists to measure, and certainly difficult to imagine.  And then there’s the Higgs boson we’ve heard so much about recently.  That decays almost as soon as it’s formed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  But if the subatomic particles formed are what the theory predicts, then as one senior scientist put it, we’ve got “A smoking duck that walks and quacks like the Higgs.”

This week’s quote:

          “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom”.  Isaac Asimov said this in his 1988 book, Book of Science and Nature Quotations.  It's certainly still true today.

 This week’s trivia:

          Human brains account for only 2 percent of our bodies, but use an incredible 20 percent of our energy requirements.