London City in A Square MM

[cronus]

If you modeled the city of London, say 50 miles by 50 given the outer reaches, down to a square millimeter how fine scaled would it be before atoms became a issue with scale? How many atoms to a brick for the sake of argument? or would bricks be impossible given the size of atoms in such a model?

[rainbow]

You would be punished for mixing imperial units with metric.

[mistermack]

I don't know the answer, but you have to remember that an atom isn't the smallest that you can go.

It's nowhere near the smallest thing. In fact, atoms are almost all empty space. And then of course, when atoms break down, you can go much much smaller. Like in a neutron star, or more still, like in a black hole. And the ultimate compression is the entire universe, contained in a volume of a pinhead, just after the big bang.

[cronus]

I don't know the answer, but you have to remember that an atom isn't the smallest that you can go.

It's nowhere near the smallest thing. In fact, atoms are almost all empty space. And then of course, when atoms break down, you can go much much smaller. Like in a neutron star, or more still, like in a black hole. And the ultimate compression is the entire universe, contained in a volume of a pinhead, just after the big bang.

They're the smallest things that stay put long enough to build a model with. Try stacking up electrons?

[Calilasseia]

Working this problem entirely in metric units, so as to please rainbow ...

We'll take a circle of radius 50 Km as our working space, which gives us a diameter of 100 Km, which, when converted to imperial units, is approximately 62 miles. So this should be sufficient to apply to the problem.

So, we're shrinking everything within a 100 Km diameter circle down so that the entire circle is contained within a square millimetre. There are 1,000 millimetres in a metre, 1,000 metres in a kilometre, therefore our scale factor is 10-8. According to this document, a standard British house brick as the following dimensions:

Length: 225 mm
Width: 112.5 mm
Height: 75 mm

Taking the smallest of these dimensions, reducing 75 mm by a factor of 10-8 reduces the smallest dimension of a standard British house brick to 7.5 × 10-11 m.

At this point, we note that the typical value for the Van der Waals radius of atoms is around 1.5 × 10-10 m. Unfortunately, this means that on the modelling scale calculated above, house bricks end up being approximately half the size of a typical atom. Therefore on the scale proposed, it would be impossible to model individual bricks with any actual physical material.

[mistermack]

I don't know the answer, but you have to remember that an atom isn't the smallest that you can go.

It's nowhere near the smallest thing. In fact, atoms are almost all empty space. And then of course, when atoms break down, you can go much much smaller. Like in a neutron star, or more still, like in a black hole. And the ultimate compression is the entire universe, contained in a volume of a pinhead, just after the big bang.

They're the smallest things that stay put long enough to build a model with. Try stacking up electrons?

Maybe you could make it out of neutrons? So long as you made it in under fifteen minutes.
It could be like an ice-sculpture, as a temporary piece that starts melting as soon as you make it.

[cronus]

Could be done in 4 sq mm then? Interesting...

[mistermack]

Could be done in 4 sq mm then? Interesting...

Yeh. All you need now is a neutron 3d printer, and 3d version of Google Earth.

[cronus]

Could be done in 4 sq mm then? Interesting...

Yeh. All you need now is a neutron 3d printer, and 3d version of Google Earth.

So I've gotta wait another ten or fifteen years before I can begin?

[mistermack]

Could be done in 4 sq mm then? Interesting...

Yeh. All you need now is a neutron 3d printer, and 3d version of Google Earth.

So I've gotta wait another ten or fifteen years before I can begin?

I think you'll find something to do, to fill in the time.

In any case, London will be under water in fifteen years time, when the ice-caps melt.
So it should get a little simpler.

[piscator]

Working this problem entirely in metric units, so as to please rainbow ...

We'll take a circle of radius 50 Km as our working space, which gives us a diameter of 100 Km, which, when converted to imperial units, is approximately 62 miles. So this should be sufficient to apply to the problem.

So, we're shrinking everything within a 100 Km diameter circle down so that the entire circle is contained within a square millimetre. There are 1,000 millimetres in a metre, 1,000 metres in a kilometre, therefore our scale factor is 10-8. According to this document, a standard British house brick as the following dimensions:

Length: 225 mm
Width: 112.5 mm
Height: 75 mm

Taking the smallest of these dimensions, reducing 75 mm by a factor of 10-8 reduces the smallest dimension of a standard British house brick to 7.5 × 10-11 m.

At this point, we note that the typical value for the Van der Waals radius of atoms is around 1.5 × 10-10 m. Unfortunately, this means that on the modelling scale calculated above, house bricks end up being approximately half the size of a typical atom. Therefore on the scale proposed, it would be impossible to model individual bricks with any actual physical material.

So change the scale. Do you think roads are drawn to scale on quad sheets?

Why arbitrarily decide on atoms when 8 photons can render a brick timelessly?

[cronus]

Working this problem entirely in metric units, so as to please rainbow ...

We'll take a circle of radius 50 Km as our working space, which gives us a diameter of 100 Km, which, when converted to imperial units, is approximately 62 miles. So this should be sufficient to apply to the problem.

So, we're shrinking everything within a 100 Km diameter circle down so that the entire circle is contained within a square millimetre. There are 1,000 millimetres in a metre, 1,000 metres in a kilometre, therefore our scale factor is 10-8. According to this document, a standard British house brick as the following dimensions:

Length: 225 mm
Width: 112.5 mm
Height: 75 mm

Taking the smallest of these dimensions, reducing 75 mm by a factor of 10-8 reduces the smallest dimension of a standard British house brick to 7.5 × 10-11 m.

At this point, we note that the typical value for the Van der Waals radius of atoms is around 1.5 × 10-10 m. Unfortunately, this means that on the modelling scale calculated above, house bricks end up being approximately half the size of a typical atom. Therefore on the scale proposed, it would be impossible to model individual bricks with any actual physical material.

So change the scale. Do you think roads are drawn to scale on quad sheets?

Why arbitrarily decide on atoms when 8 photons can render a brick timelessly?

Photons in a render engine don't actually exist. They are called photons. Not really anything except mathematical notation.

[piscator]

Working this problem entirely in metric units, so as to please rainbow ...

We'll take a circle of radius 50 Km as our working space, which gives us a diameter of 100 Km, which, when converted to imperial units, is approximately 62 miles. So this should be sufficient to apply to the problem.

So, we're shrinking everything within a 100 Km diameter circle down so that the entire circle is contained within a square millimetre. There are 1,000 millimetres in a metre, 1,000 metres in a kilometre, therefore our scale factor is 10-8. According to this document, a standard British house brick as the following dimensions:

Length: 225 mm
Width: 112.5 mm
Height: 75 mm

Taking the smallest of these dimensions, reducing 75 mm by a factor of 10-8 reduces the smallest dimension of a standard British house brick to 7.5 × 10-11 m.

At this point, we note that the typical value for the Van der Waals radius of atoms is around 1.5 × 10-10 m. Unfortunately, this means that on the modelling scale calculated above, house bricks end up being approximately half the size of a typical atom. Therefore on the scale proposed, it would be impossible to model individual bricks with any actual physical material.

So change the scale. Do you think roads are drawn to scale on quad sheets?

Why arbitrarily decide on atoms when 8 photons can render a brick timelessly?

Photons in a render engine don't actually exist. They are called photons. Not really anything except mathematical notation.

They sound like "Points", or "Nodes", "Lines" or even "Polylines" - all dimensionless in at least 1 dimension. Rendering just fills spaces between dimensionless objects with various "textures", densities, and colors of scalable hatching, if my dim rememberings of paper space CAD renderings serve me.