A few months ago, after I remembered reading the analogy somewhere, I thought it’d be fun to take the size of something inconceivably small (a neutrino), increase it to some arbitrary size (a golf ball), compare it to something massive in comparison (an atom) and then create an accurate scale model to be designed and printed as a poster.
After about a minute of doing calculations I realized the distances were too large, and there’d be no way to visibly see the dot that represented the neutrino. Then I found out the size of a neutrino is more dependent on its momentum than having a standard size (way over my head), but that’s a whole other issue.
Josh Worth beat me to the digital version of a similar idea with “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel“, which I saw linked on Daring Fireball earlier today. I love this, and his writing in the vastness of space is fantastic:
Even when Shakespeare wrote: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – he’s basically trying to give us a loophole to make the ghost in the story more believable.
Maybe I’ll have to find some other mind blowing fact so I can actually create that poster.