Weighing heavy? It’s a matter of scale

Late in 2012 I wrote a blog post entitled “Have you got the time for Superman, dynamic light scattering, and small-angle X-ray scattering”?  In this, I talked about how much bigger we are than the atoms and molecules that make us up but how much smaller we are than the stars like our own sun (not daughter).

So, where do we lie in between the two extremes of atom and the Sun?

Consider a human being of weight 127 pounds (American) ~ 57.7 kilos.  And let’s work in c.g.s. units where I feel more comfortable.   We have:

Mass of H atom: 1.67 X 10^-24 g           [A]

Mass of person:  5.77 X 10⁴ g              [B]

Mass of sun: 2 X 10³³ g                         [C]

So, B/A = 3.46E28 and C/B = 3.47E28……… almost identical. Indeed that’s why I selected 127 pounds…

It’s mind-boggling to think that we’re an almost exact ratio between the Sun and the hydrogen atom.

And thank you to Philip J Davis’s book “The Lore of Large Numbers” for getting me back to this theme.