It can be hard to appreciate how a great number of operations at one size scale correspond to operations at another. 3D video game events seem so seamless and realistic, despite comprising billions of operations per second at the transistor level. Biological events at the molecular level give rise to bigger cellular components, which in turn produce cells themselves. Cells then organize into tissues and organs.

In atomically precise manufacturing (APM), nanoscale parts assemble into larger, more complex machines. At the smallest scale, you'd need an electron microscope to see anything meaningful. A little further down the assembly line, you'd only need a regular light microscope. Eventually, the process will start to resemble what you'd see at a traditional factory, with robot arms and machinery the size of the end product.

Time Gradients

If we could observe the origins of these processes, we'd see millions or billions of operations occurring per second. From there to the physically observable scale—what we can see with unaided eyes—is a spectrum of time/speed scales. A depiction of this spectrum might illuminate how some large events take us by surprise.

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I'd like to find ways to illustrate this gradient of time, maybe using a metric of some kind which we can compare at each size level. For the processes we're considering (biology, computation, APM), we're either moving something, computing something, or building something. Do we need to hold certain properties (e.g. stress and materials properties) constant to make a meaningful illustration? Physical devices don't behave the same way at all scales, but we're not trying to argue that a machine at a certain level will function the same way at another level.

It seems more straightforward to make spatial comparisons to help people appreciate the sizes of structures over a wide range. But time is another beast.

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