I know it’s not relevant and nobody cares but those bigger -illion numbers really tick me off. Like, it was once was a perfectly usable system. It was a million to some power. So a quintillion is a 5-illion, is a million to the 5th power, is 10^30. Simple. But then headline writers got a hold of the words billion and trillion to sensationalise about stuff like national budgets, who cares if they’re using the right words for the right numbers, and now the pattern is broken. It’s, what? A thousand times a thousand raised to a power?
So 40 quintillion is … 40 × a thousand × a thousand to the fifth power, is … 4×10^(1+3+15), 4×10^19? Is that right? 40,000,000,000,000,000,000? Why does it have to be so difficult? It’s just numbers.
Lol, this reeks of the occasional stupidity behind necessary red tape. For those that didn’t read it, 2 of the fasteners require tools to remove that are not certified for the pure nitrogen environment they’re working in. Because it’s NASA, I can guarantee there is a very tightly controlled list of tools that are allowed to be used in the lab; each of which has gone through hundreds of hours of testing, documentation, and approval by at least one board. So even though all they need is essentially just a screwdriver, it’s going to take weeks or months to get all the approvals in place to use it.
I 100% agree with the rules. You really don’t want to take any chances whatsoever in that field. It just occasionally leads to funny delays like this.
You seem to be talking out of both sides of your mouth there.
They’re dumb because there’s red tape, but the red tape is there so they don’t accidentally ruin the sample? It’s stupid, but it’s a good thing?
This is NASA, the smartest people in the world, who just spent a ton of time, money, and resources retrieving a small sample of material. They don’t want to fuck it up. The tools have to fit in the container, they have to not contaminate the material, they have to do one job and do it perfectly, and they have one chance at it.
Let them take a minute to think about it, there’s no rush here.
But they designed the container… they decided the environment to open it in… why haven’t they already tried and certified the tools needed to open it? Wasn’t that thought of in advance? Or is this just a case of, these tools should work, but for some reason failed? Which is what i’m assuming, since only 2 of the 35 can’t be removed, but still.
The article linked here is kind of crappy. It’s just a single fact stretched out into a couple of paragraphs with no context. Take a look at these real articles, they show the confined space the scientists and engineers are working in, and why it’s so important to take their time doing things right.
If this was just a regular box, you spray some penetrating oil on it, or you can heat it, or you can crank on the bolt until it breaks, then drill out the remaining parts. But all of those options can ruin the sample inside.
This is a box with unique material, they have one chance to open it, and there is no time limit on opening the box. So they’re going to sit down and do some math and figure out the best way to open the box without ruining the contents. They’ll get it open, they just really really don’t want to fuck it up, cause they don’t get a second try at it.
if a length measurement yields 114.8 mm, using a ruler with the smallest interval between marks at 1 mm, the first three digits (1, 1, and 4, representing 114 mm) are certain and constitute significant figures.
Let’s assume they measured these 40 quintillion with a “ruler” which has a resolution of 1 quintillion. In that case, they could just as well say the number is 40.1539577 quintillion, or dream up any other combination of digits after the leading ‘40’ (like, for example “000,000,000…”). Because they don’t know.
But if they noted a non-zero string of digits, readers would wrongly assume their ruler has sufficient precision to measure these smaller digits.
So this notation conveys two insights:
We know the first digit(s): It’s 4. (and maybe 40, 400, …)
We don’t know the smaller digits, but we do know the magnitude.
So a non-round number would be suspicious, because it pretends to have precision which it most certainly cannot have.
I used to think this idea was kinda silly and based on flimsy and handwavey justification, but then I saw a colloquium by a famous black hole physicist on it. Now I REALLY think this idea is silly and made up!
One thought that always fascinated me was the idea that maybe our universe does appear to outsiders … but it only appears as a sudden momentary flash. We see billions of years, they barely notice a spark.
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