The other day, a good friend gave me a fake $1,000,000 bill with Obama on the front and Disney’s Fantasy Land on back. I thought, and think, that it is kind of cute, considering the nearly three trillion dollar deficit that our country’s rulers are piling up this year. Every time I open my wallet to pay for something, there it is. So, recently, when I was paying a nice lady for my haircut, I handed it to her and asked, “Would you accept this for my haircut?” She took it, stared at it for a few seconds, looked over her shoulder at her boss and said, “Helen, can we break this?” Of course, the boss laughed, pointed out her error, I got out a ten, paid and every one parted on a happy note. But, I got to thinking … that poor lady actually thought that it was a real bill and thought that maybe she could make change. She, like most of us, has no concept of large numbers.
As an engineer, I am used to working with extremely large and extremely small numbers, like Avogadro’s number (6.02 x 10^23) (6 with 23 zeros behind it) on the large side and Planck’s constant (6.62 x 10^-34) (decimal point and 33 zeros before the first six) on the small. How does a mere human visualize these numbers or a number like a trillion in some meaningful way.
First, let’s look at the lady barber. If she lived and worked each day for 100 years and saved $28 each day, she would just barely save $1,000,000. Since a trillion is a million million, she would have to live 100 million years to save a trillion. The other day, President Obama’s minions were bragging about the administration saving $140,000,000 … a lot of money. But look at the number. $140 million is to one trillion as $140 is to a million. Kind of puts it into perspective, doesn’t it?
I am fond of visualizing dollar bills stacked one on top of another. I have actually measured the thickness of a dollar with a micrometer and found it to be 0.004 of an inch thick. That means that a stack of $250 would be one inch high … $3000 to the foot … $15,840, 000 to the mile … $1.6 billion to the 100 miles. 62.5 miles to a billion dollars … 62,500 miles to the trillion. A trillion dollars is a row of dollar bills stacked one on top of the other that, laid down, would go around the Earth at the equator 2 1/2 times or stacked straight up would reach 1/4 of the way to the moon, three times higher than is necessary for the orbit of a geo-synchronous satillite. Could you use: … an inch of that money? … a foot? … a yard? A mile would certainly tickle me!!
Another way that I have to look at the number one trillion is to stack the bills as before, only this time only 10 feet high ($30,000). Imagine placing lots of these little columns of bills side by each until they covered a football field. A trillion dollars arranged in this manner would cover 30 football fields. (approximately 21 acres of dollars ten feet high)
Now, looking at the small side of numbers, if you took one dollar out of that 21 acre pile, you would have one part per trillion.
Environmentalists like to scare us. They say that mercury, a liquid metal that people of my generation played with all the time, is a deadly poison, which it is, I might add, in large concentrations (see: “Mad Hatter”). Environmentalists have manipulated the government bureaucracy into declaring that mercury in any concentration is unacceptable … zero concentration. Our science is now advanced enough so that we can detect mercury in tenths of a part per trillion (or equivalent to $1 in a 210 acre pile as above). Do you suppose that taking a dollar out of that pile is going to be noticeable in any way , to affect anything? And don’t forget that mercury (or arsenic, or lead or … ?) is a naturally occurring element and as such is everywhere on the Earth.
When people start talking to us about things that are very large (or small) we should take great pains to understand the numbers, because if the alarmists are not trying to consciously manipulate us, they themselves probably don’t know what they are talking about. We should make sure that we ourselves do understand!