Different Scales

Last Updated on Thursday, 17 September 2015 03:11 Written by Albert Greenhut Friday, 3 October 2014 02:40

Sometimes making sense of things that are on different scales of magnitude than we are can be difficult. I use scale in the broadest of terms here. Sometimes it is hard to wrap our minds around the really big things like the scale of the universe or on the small end of the spectrum like atoms or quarks. Other scales include things that are moving quickly or slowly. Really anything that is outside of our ability, mainly our senses, to experience can be hard to grasp. Technology has helped us grasp and understand some of these things. My favorite visualization of scale is from the video, see below, from the 70s when we were beginning to climb up the steep curve of technology, in that case it was microscopes and telescopes. Time lapse or high-speed cameras have more recently helped us envision things that were previously undetectable to our eyes. Things like the growth rate of lichen or how a curveball spins can now actually be seen in motion.

One interesting application of this is mapping out the wing patterns of different types of winged creatures found here. The scientist watched slowed down versions of revolutions of different creatures’ wings to show how they work. I thought that the most interesting ones were the goose and the dragonfly. The goose uses its elbow joint on the upswing to rotate it wing and the dragonfly’s two sets of wings move differently. Humans have started being able to visualize these things to visualize how they work.

Intercept Technology™ uses billions of copper particles to react with corrosive gases that are in the air (1.3 billion copper particles per square meter of material to be exact). From the human scale we see this as a flat surface, but if you look at it under great magnification you can see the peaks and valleys that unearth a huge amount of surface area which maximizes the number of these reactions and increases the effectiveness of cleaning the environment inside of the bag, creating a clean and safe method for storage and transportation of corrosion and degradation sensitive materials. The resulting reactive barrier provides an enormous amount of opportunities for these reactions to occur, making the likelihood of happening greater.

Another way we see this micro corrosion occurring in a tangible way is by watching the color of our Corrosion Intercept® films and bags change from copper to black or green or our Static Intercept® film as it shifts from dark brown to black. Even though this is happening at the molecular level it becomes tangible at the human scale.

Learn more at www.staticintercept.com