Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug

Lembot_0003@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Gustephan@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Somebody else already said it, but that’s what the title is.

  Longform: for a lot of calculations that happen in astro deal with distances so large so large that only order of magnitude changes actually meaningfully affect the end result. To connect to a more common topic, here’s a joke. “Whats the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?” “About a billion dollars” This joke works for the same reason; 1 billion is so many orders of magnitude larger than 1 million that (1,000,000,000 - 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000) is only incorrect by ~0.1%, even though substituting 0 for 1 million in that equation seems ridiculous on the face of it

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  • ryedaft@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also how you get classical physics from relativity.

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    • psud@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And you only see the error in classical physics is the very fast orbit of mercury or the precision of GPS satellites

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• rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  In astronomy, the important part of the number is often just how big it is (that is, the exponent). Multiplying by pi doesn’t change much in that.

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• OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The explanation is in the title.

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  • Lembot_0003@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It isn’t an explanation

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• InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Astronomy often has pretty high error bars on their measurements (distance, size of stuff, etc).

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