As a rather nerdy schoolboy, I read somewhere an apocryphal quote by an Alaskan old-timer that "in Winter, the temperature stays forty below". For many years I wondered now and again whether this was in degrees Centigrade or Fahrenheit. WFL On 11/12/17, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Naturally, this means that it's ridiculously hot on the planet's surface, with temperatures reaching 2000 degrees Celsius (3632 Fahrenheit), ...
Reminds me of the joke about someone saying "The temperature at the center of the sun is fifteen million degrees, but I can't remember whether that's centigrade or absolute."
Jim
On Sunday, November 12, 2017, Keith F. Lynch <kfl@keithlynch.net> wrote:
Guy Haworth <g.haworth@reading.ac.uk <javascript:;>> wrote:
The Cheddar Gorge is 10,000,001 years old this year.
I know this because last year ...
That's a precision fail, not a counting fail. It's perfectly valid to add one year to the age of something each year, no matter how old it is. Except that the age of very old things is seldom known to the nearest year. And gorges, unlike, say, individual dinosaurs, don't have precise birthdays anyway. (That joke is more commonly told about dinosaurs, with a museum guard answering that a particular specimen is is 100,000,003 years old, or whatever.)
Also, for very high precision or for extremely long distances or times, the age depends on the trajectory of the clock.
For instance how old is Mount Everest? I haven't been able to find that number anywhere. Wikipedia says it's 8848 meters tall and that the Himalayas are growing by 5 millimeters per year. That would imply an age of 1769600 years. If, at the instant the mountain started its climb from sea level someone had placed a perfect clock where it would ride up the peak and another perfect clock where it would remain at sea level, today the two clocks would disagree by 24 seconds as to the age of the mountain, due to general relativity.
You'd get far more variance on how long ago the Big Bang was, since there are so many choices of "reasonable" trajectories for a clock that formed that very instant and conveniently lands in from of you just when you want to know the age of the universe.
Precision fails are very common. For instance:
Naturally, this means that it's ridiculously hot on the planet's surface, with temperatures reaching 2000 degrees Celsius (3632 Fahrenheit), ...
https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/16744- astronomers-planet-titanium-atmosphere
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