A radio wave has hit Earth after travelling through space for 8 billion years. @AlexWilkins22 says it's the oldest fast radio burst ever detected, with enough energy to microwave a bowl of popcorn twice the size of our Sun 🍿☀️
I'm fascinated by the analogies science writers use. You know, the moon is four million football fields away or a volcano is equal to a thousand H-bombs or whatnot. And I always wonder: does the analogy help? Is four million football fields any more understandable than 240,000 miles?
But this one is truly spectacular. I mean, first of all, how did they figure out how much energy it would take to pop a sun-sized bowl of popcorn? Linear extrapolation from a one ounce bag? And by "twice the size" of the sun do they mean twice the diameter? Twice the volume? These things matter. How long would it take? And are we talking about a sun-sized bowl of raw popcorn or is this the size of the finished product? How much salt and butter would it require? And how long would it take to eat if every human on earth helped out?
There are more questions than answers here. On a helpfulness scale of 1-10, I judge this analogy a zero.
Sounds like a question for Randall Monroe.
+1000
I thought the Olympic-sized swimming pool was the media's standard unit of volume.
Football fields --everything is measured in football fields.
Football fields are two-dimensional. You can't measure volume with a football field.
I am confident we can find examples of that being done.
That made me burst out laughing -- because sadly, I'm sure you are right.
I did it in chords of wood, stacked end to end. I was trying to explain how much wood was cut in the working forests of my home state. So I figured the average length of that wood in chords, and using the scale on my globe, cut a piece of string, pinned it to home, and saw where it intersected. The most interesting choice was Mt. Everest; it stretched from Maine to Mount Everest.
Of course, after going through the complex exercise to figure this visualization aid out, I cut the whole section on the amount of wood logged out, it was tangental to my story on trail building in Maine's northern forests.
What does the chord of wood sound like?
When the New Scientist says "football", it means what we yanks call "soccer", right? But is there a separate British "football" that's much like soccer, but isn't?
And why can't Americans use standard measures, like meters and grams?
Exceptionalism preclude confirmation.
"And how long would it take to eat if every human on earth helped out?"
I think that is approximately 4.5 House Speaker elections.
😉
though sometimes I'd prefer they wouldn't convert the text to an emoji
I like to demarcate elapsed time in terms of Friedman units, where appropriate.
That is an excellent one.
In a similar vein, when I worked at universities, I would sometimes have occasion to point out that deciding on and implementing some particular policy change shouldn't take longer than it took the Allies to win World War II.
You underestimate how much help the average person needs to get through a single sentence with numbers in it without their eyes fully glazing over.
If you want people to remotely care about science they need Olympic swimming pools full of spoon feeding.
Okay, fine. How many spoonfuls are in an Olympic-sized pool then?
A LOT!
This post is pretty curmudgeonly for the sake of being curmudgeonly, it seems.
Even as someone who is fairly science literate, I find this analogy to be a 6 or 7 on the usefulness scale for those who aren't. The specifics of volume vs. diameter, sun-sized popped or unpopped - none of that is important. All that matters is that it's expressed as something that's got one large number ("sun-sized") and one everyday object that can be conceptualized in the everyday human brain ("popcorn"). The point isn't being exact about it, it's about expressing how far beyond the everyday experience these things are. Also, let scientists have some fun, why don't you? It's more fun to think about how much popcorn the microwave energy would pop instead of just thinking about it in terawatts or whatever.
Likewise, I find something like "4 million football fields" is a better way to report to the general public than just "240,000 miles" or whatever the actual equivalent is. While 4 million is still a very large number that the brain can't visualize, it's better than 2 large units that the brain can't visualize: 240,000 and 1 mile. The brain can at least visualize the everyday "unit" of the football field.
This post is specifically about amount of energy . Wouldn't it be better to say "the same amount of energy as the Sun outputs in X time"?
How does mentioning popcorn contributes anything?
I agree, maybe a comparison to atomic bombs or something…microwaves to popcorn means little….
CNN does it right:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/19/world/distant-ancient-fast-radio-burst-scn/index.html
"The burst, named FRB 20220610A, lasted less than a millisecond, but in that fraction of a moment, it released the equivalent of our sun’s energetic emissions over the course of 30 years, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. "
I'll accept "let scientists (or science journalists) have some fun". But you're just wrong about 4 million football fields. We can visualize 240,000 miles as being a bit less than the distance a car will travel in its lifetime.
I agree with you, Kevin. It's useless. It's safe to say this radio burst passed over Earth without popping even one average-sized bowl of popcorn.
I rate is close to zero. I think vast scales are incomprehensible. I easily can write down a number using scientific notation and understand the meaning, but I admit that after 35 years as a practicing scientist, my mind still cannot not really wrap around some scales. I don’t think I could ever really grasp what it would mean to fill the solar system with maple syrup
So, to a first approximation, filling the solar system with water, plus some minor impurities.
But, seems like it would collapse to a black hole pretty quickly. But, maybe most of it collapses into a supernova that blows out a shell of water vapor, seeding the nearby galactic arm with an abundance of oxygen...
I’ve been reading and hearing the “moon is a quarter million miles away from earth” thing since the first moon landing. 240,000 miles! And not until today, reading this post about analogies, did I think to think, hey, 240K miles is only ten times around the earth. 240,000! or “a quarter million!” had me thinking vast unimaginable distance. Ten times around earth has me thinking, “I could drive that in my Subaru!”
Did NASA ever use the ten times around earth analogy?
This is a very good use of analogy to help understand scale. I think it is helpful because the scales are still imaginable. At some point, this breaks down, at least for me. Then I enter the world of rationalization as opposed to a real intuitive grasp.
If you popped a sun-sized bowl of popcorn (or two, since that's the figure given), and then divided it up for each of us 8 billion people to eat, each person would have to eat 3.2 billion cubic *miles* of popcorn.
I think that would give you one hell of a stomach ache.
Assumptions -- that's the volume of the unpeopled kernels, which pop to 25X in volume. "Twice the volume of the sun" means 2X the volume.
Obviously that much popcorn would do some serious damage to the earth and its inhabitants, if you just dumped it on the earth after popping it, since the popcorn would form a layer 1.8 million miles high. I'm not sure what that would do to the atmosphere, so it might be hard to breathe. I have to go make dinner now, so I can't do the math, but I think you'd be crushed dead under the weight, even if you don't butter it.
We would all be Mr Creosote.
If you put one kernel of corn on a corner of a checkers board. The double that for the next square. And again for the one after that, and keep going until the end, would that be more or less than the 2 suns worth of kernels.?
And what would that 2 sun volume be once popped??
The problem with some of these analogies is that it makes it sound as if the Earth was hit with that much energy, not that that much energy was needed at the source so we'd be able to detect it this far away.
That’s my main objection. Actually, I would rather know how much energy actually arrived at the Earth’s atmosphere, or surface, or square meter of Earth’s surface. Should I have been wearing my tinfoil hat?
so 2^64 kernels vs 3*10^27 cubic meters... 2^64 ~ 10^18 or 10^19, so, hugely less than 2 suns.
The 2-sun volume once popped would be around 60-suns give or take.
My sweetie, a HAM radio operator, says the sun until recently was in a long-sun spot drought, provoking bad radio conditions. The HAMs are overjoyed that the sun spot cycle has again sprung to life, and the communication is lively.
And when I try to envision this, I imagine the sun polishes the heavens into a mirror so that the waves bounce and skip and propagate around the globe.
Is that a sun-sized bowl of kernels or popped corn?
Come on. The whole point is that the analogue is something too big to be imagined. That's all. It's HUUUUUUUGE.
How much popcorn? My daughter would say, "A heck ton." She's nice girl.
Silly distraction to stop people asking what was playing on the radio. Space-alien shock jocks?
This writer created a website inspired by the frequency with which one sees the state of Connecticut used as a unit of measure - https://thesizeofconnecticut.com/about/
I have (sadly) moved to the Upper Midwest from that lovely place, my adopted home state …
The one I hate is when a writer notes that some microscopic object is several microns across and compares that to the width of a human hair. Human hair varies by a huge amount. Just say it in microns. People will figure it out.
In this case I’d be happy to just compare it to the amount of sunshine we get in a second.
How could you even cook a bowl of popcorn that big. Gravity would cause it to collapse on itself before it popped.
I think you would need about 1/3rd of a Jupiter of butter. I'm not sure if the amount of salt would be an Earth or a Moon.
Each person would get to eat somewhere around 10^17 cubic meters of popcorn. It seems barely feasible that a person could eat a cubic meter of popcorn a day. So, it would take something like 10^14 years for the human race to eat the popcorn. Give or take a couple orders of magnitude.