The science teacher or science communicator (such as journalists or authors of popular sicence books) has the task of making the unfamiliar become familiar to an audiences. There are various technqiues tha can be used including models and simulaitons, and analogies and similes.
Read about making the unfamiliar familiar
Science encompasses all scales including those that are very small (such as molecules, and processes that take a tiny fraciton of a second) and very large (such as galaxies and geological processes). A common technique used when reporting a value that seems extreme is to offer a compariosn with something more quotidian – everyday.
Examples:
"Some of the largest stony meteorites to arrive on Earth have been up to 60 tonnes in weight which is about the same as five double-decker buses."
Natalie Starkey, Catching Stardust: Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system
"Ptolemy is a 5kg (11lb), shoe-box sized, miniature version of a mass spectrometer housed in a laboratory at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. The full-size, Earth-based instrument is easily the size of a car garage. "
Natalie Starkey, Catching Stardust: Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system
astronomy
- a teaspoon of neutron star weighs as much as Mount Everest (Dr. Olivia Jones)
- if the Sun was the size of a tennis ball; the star that formed supernova 1987a would be as big as the London Eye (Dr. Olivia Jones)
- if the sun were a large pumpkin the Earth would be a pea (George Gamow)
ethology and animal behaviour
microbes
- hundreds of bacteriophages could fit across the diameter of a human hair (Prof. James Ebdon, University of Brighton)
- there are a trillion bacteriophages for every grain of sand on the planet (Prof. James Ebdon, University of Brighton)
IceCube neutrino observatory
The image above (from the project website), showing the Eiffel Tower buried deep in the Antarctic ice is not part of a storyboard for a future James Bond movie with villains stealing cultural important relics for ransom, but a schematic for a science experiment. The vast scale of the observatory – needed because neutrinos barely interact with matter, so mostly pass through it unnoticed – is indicated by how the experiment dwarfs the familiar Eiffel Tower that is normally experienced as a large object.
Not-quite-so quotidian comparisons?
Sometimes, the numbers involved offer no obvious everyday comprisons, and science communicators have to rely on less-directly familiar comparisons:
"The [2013] Chelyabinsk meteor fireball was so bright that it could be seen easily in the day and it also produced a loud sonic boom as it entered the atmosphere, caused by n 'air blast' explosion that broke the rock into pieces. … The energy released in this air blast even was equivalent to 500 kilotonnes of TNT, or 30 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb."
Natalie Starkey, Catching Stardust: Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system
