Some Big (and Small) Things at WMS
I just want to take a moment to give a few shout outs to my
amazing students this year. I am so grateful to have a strong, dedicated crop
of young adults who constantly push themselves (and me) towards
success. They make the work I do enjoyable every day.
It doesn’t hurt that it’s easy to be excited at this time of
year. The weather’s cooling down and the leaves are starting to turn. That
signals to me that it’s time to begin my favorite project of the year.
One of the hardest things to cope with in math is the fact
our number system is incredibly large. Not only does it span from infinitely
positive to infinitely negative, but there are infinitely many conceivable numbers between any two numbers you can name. Trying to put all of that into a
mental picture is tough work! It’s exactly that work that my students will be
focusing on over the next two weeks.
Using the work of Cary Huang as a starting
point my students will work together to create a graphic organizer depicting
the sizes of important objects in the universe. We’ll work with things that are
immeasurably small, like a quantum string (which is trillionth of a trillionth
of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter). We’ll then work our way up to the
size of the universe, which is just under a trillion trillion trillion meters
wide.
Digesting all of these huge (and small) numbers is tough, and
if you’re interested on giving it a shot feel free to start small (http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/)
and work your way up to the real deal (http://scaleofuniverse.com/).
I hope you enjoy. I know my kids (and I) will.
Mike Remchuk
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