Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug

Lembot_0003@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Gustephan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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

  source

  • ryedaft@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Also how you get classical physics from relativity.

    source
• InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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

  source
• rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

  source
• OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The explanation is in the title.

  source

  • Lembot_0003@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It isn’t an explanation

    source