Measurement

We seem to live in an eleven-dimensional space, most of whose dimensions are folded up into something called the Calabi-Yau Manifold. Here is a section of a quintic Calabi-Yau threefold projected into three-dimensional space (though obviously then projected onto the virtually two-dimensional surface of this monitor or piece of paper):

According to Doctor Who, various beings live in Calabi-Yau space, including the Guardians of Time, Chronovores, the Great Old Ones (for example Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu) and I reckon also the reapers and so on. I also sometimes wonder if an ex-friend of mine belongs there. However, all of this can be safely ignored if you consider yourselves to be entities consisting of a single world-line existing in space and time and having finite mass, as I expect you do. As far as we're concerned for the purposes of this document, there are three dimensions of space, one of time and one of mass, and these are the things I'm going to talk about here. Everything in a small region of space can be pretty accurately located at a particular moment using three numbers to describe its position. For instance, my head is currently about a metre from the wall to my left, a metre and a half from the floor and three metres from the French windows behind me. The fact that I only need three numbers to describe where my head is.

Consider this humble toilet roll:

This has a location within this room which can be described using those three numbers, using the X, Y and Z axes:

If you wanted to tell someone where that toilet roll was, you would only need three numbers to do it, and those numbers would represent measurements along those three axes. The simplest measurement to describe is probably length. The metric system uses a unit called the metre (often written as m), to measure length. This was originally defined as follows. Here's Earth:

If you imagine a line like this:

drawn from the North Pole to the Equator through Calais in Artois, France, it will be exactly 10 000 kilometres long. This is because, just after the French Revolution, a metre was defined as a ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a line which passes through Calais. Nowadays, this isn't considered accurate enough so they use a particular colour of light and count the number of waves in it instead. This older measurement varies quite a bit anyway because of things like rocks expanding in summer and contracting in winter. If this document is on a piece of paper, that paper will be 0.211 metres wide (211 millimetres or 21.1 centimetres) and 0.297 metres high (297 millimetres or 29.7 centimetres). Therefore, a metre is about three and a third A4 pieces of paper long. That means that if you started at the equator with a large stack of A4 sheets of waterproof paper and put them end to end from there to the North Pole, you would need 33670033 and two-thirds of them. That would make a pile 3367 metres high, which is not actually that much if you think about it in terms of shelf

space in libraries, bookshops and so on. Many other units in the metric system are defined using the metre. Area is length times depth, or breadth, or height, and so on. It can be measured in square metres. If this is a piece of paper, it has an area of 62667 square millimetres, which can be written as 62667 mm 2. This is the same as 626.67 cm2 or 0.62667 m2, (square metres). I will come back to the issue of how many pieces of A4 paper would be needed to cover this planet entirely, because it's not simple. The metric system is also known as the Systme International, SI for short. The official SI unit of area is the are, which is a hundred square metres. That would be the area of a square ten metres on a side, or nearly sixteen hundred sheets of A4. However, the are itself is rarely used as a unit of area and it's much more common to use the hectare, which is a hundred times bigger. This is the unit of area used to measure things like fields and floorspace in large buildings. A hectare is ten thousand square metres, so a square a hundred metres on a side would have an area of one hectare. This is very close to the area of Trafalgar Square:

Volume is how big something is. A cube has a volume of the length of one of its edges multiplied by itself, then multiplied by itself again. A cubic metre can be written as m 3, i.e. with a 3. Once again, the SI unit of volume is not the cubic metre but the litre, although science often uses the term cubic decimetre for this. A litre, or cubic decimetre (dm 3), is the volume of a cube with an edge measuring ten centimetres or one decimetre (dm), a tenth of a metre. Then there's mass. Mass is the quantity of a substance, which is different than its size. For instance, a litre of outer space is quite likely not to contain anything at all but is still a litre in volume. The SI unit of mass is the kilogramme, which is the mass of a litre of distilled water at 4C, the maximum density of water. The base unit, however, is a thousandth of that the gramme, or gram. A million grammes, rather than being called a megagramme, is referred to as a tonne. Weight is not the same as mass, although for masses at rest on the surface of the ocean the difference between the two concepts would be absolutely minute. Weight is the force on an

object due to gravity. It is related to mass and when people say weight they are usually referring to mass by the wrong word. To illustrate the difference, here is a picture of Neil Armstrong:

In this picture, Mr Armstrong has a mass of 77 kilogrammes. Here is a picture of Neil Armstrong on the Moon:

In this picture, minus his spacesuit, Neil Armstrong has the same mass as he had in the first picture, but he weighs much less. Weight is measured in newtons. Actually, weight is not measured in newtons very much because nearly everyone usually uses units of mass to describe weight. A newton is how much force it takes to accelerate a kilogramme by one metre per second per second. In the first picture, the entire mass of our planet is pulling Mr Armstrong towards it with a force of about 754 newtons, but in the second, he is being pulled towards the centre of the Moon with a force of 126 newtons because the gravity of the Moon is only 1/6 of ours. However, his mass, which is expressed in kilogrammes, is the same 77 kilogrammes.

Formulae for volume

The simplest shape to work out the volume of is the cube:

A B This is easy because its volume is simply the cube of the length of one edge. If you call one edge AB and assume it's 3 cm long, the volume of this cube is (AB)x(AB)x(AB)=AB 3, or in this case 3x3x3=27 cm3. Just slightly more complicated is the cuboid. Cuboids have the same number of faces, edges, corners and angles as cubes but at least two of those faces are proper rectangles rather than squares. This is a cuboid:

and this is another one:

Since cuboids have up to three different lengths of edge, their volume is xyz, with each letter representing the length of an edge. For instance, this box:

has dimensions of 6x9x10.5 cm, and therefore x=6 cm, y=9 cm and z=10.5 cm, giving it a volume of 6x9x10.5 = 567 cm3, or just over half a litre. While we're at the simple stage, I just want to mention surface area. Going back to the cube example, which was 3x3x3 cm, it consists of six square faces with edges three centimetres long. Since the area of a square is the same as the length of its edge multiplied by itself, in this case 9 cm2, and it has six faces, it has a total surface area of 9x6, or 54 cm 2. There are also formulae for other shapes with only straight edges, but these are not so widely used. In order to measure the areas and volumes of curved shapes, it sometimes helps to use the number pi (). is the Greek equivalent of our Latin letter P, and stands for perimeter - the length of the edge of a shape. Here is a circle: The line going all the way across is called the diameter. The one from the centre to the edge is the radius which is Latin for spoke. The distance all the way around the circle is called the circumference, which is just a word for the perimeter of a circle. If the diameter was a piece of string and you wrapped it round the edge, you would find that you'd be able to do it just over three times, with almost a seventh of the length of the string left over. However, the key word here is almost. In fact, it's not quite a seventh.

1 , but that's 3.142857142857142857... (the three dots indicate 7 that the pattern 142857 goes on forever). is actually, so far as I can remember, 3.14159265358979323846... - those digits go a lot further than that. The first thousand digits are 3. 1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132 0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235 4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859 5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881 7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303 5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778 1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989... is sometimes said to be 3 Given the known size of the Universe (a minimum of about 27 billion light years) and the smallest useful length, the Planck Length, the number is unlikely to be useful with a greater accuracy than about sixty-one digits, but it never actually ends. It cannot be expressed in terms of any finite sum of fractions, i.e. it is irrational, like almost all real numbers, almost all of which are unknown for that reason. It's also transcendental not the root of any number, basically. comes into many volume and surface area calculations. Let's start with a circle. Here is a tape measure:

The diameter of this tape measure is 52 mm, making its radius 26 mm. The formula for calculating the circumference of a circle is 2r, where r is the radius. To work out the circumference of the tape measure, we multiply r, 26 mm, by , 3.141592653 and a bit, then

by two. That makes about 163 mm. The next stage up is to work out the area of a circle. The formula for this is r2. This is where priority comes in. Looking at the formula without knowing about it, it could mean either multiply by r and then multiply the result by itself or multiply r by itself and then multiply the result by . Luckily, there is a rule about this, which in this case says that all values should be raised to the power indicated (squared in this case) before you try anything else. There are ways round this, but we are doomed to infix notation, which makes this necessary unless some rule for right-to-left or left-to-right calculation is used, so it is normally done this way. So anyway, the tape measure is 26 mm in radius, so the area of the table it covers is calculated using that formula as follows: multiply r by itself (26 mm x 26 mm = 676 mm 2), then multiply the result by , making nearly 2124 mm2. Each side of a square of the same area would be about 46 mm long. Now consider a cuboid like this box containing a roll of aluminium foil:

This is 370 mm long, square-ended and 37 mm wide., so it has a volume of 560530 mm 3, because the width x=37 mm, height y=37 mm and length (depth) is 370 mm. The formula is the same as one for the area of a square times its length. Then there's the cylindrical roll of foil inside:

The principle for working out the volume of this roll is the same you work out the area of the circle shape, then multiply it by the length of the roll. So assuming it's also 37 mm in diameter, which gives a radius of 18.5 mm, the formula will then be: r2h where h is the height, i.e. the length, and is multiplied by the volume of the circle. Therefore the volume of the roll altogether would be roughly calculated as follows: 3.141592653 x (18.5x18.5)x370= 397828 mm3.

So in other words, the volume of a cylinder is very easy to calculate. Now for a cone:

1 r2h. I have found this less useful than the 3 others, but would tell you, for instance, how much water a funnel could hold or how much ice cream fits in a cone shaped ice cream cone, and so on, and the rough volume of objects like heaps of sand or mountains. The formula for the volume of this shape is Finally for the volumes, there is the sphere:

This is of course the Moon. It's 3476 kilometres in diameter and is roughly spherical. The formula for the volume of a sphere is:

4 r3 3 Therefore, the volume of the Moon is roughly (4 divided by 3) x 3.141592653 x (1738 x 1738 x 1738 ) cubic kilometres, or 21990642870 km3. Now for Earth. The equatorial diameter of this planet is 12756 km, although it is slightly squashed at the poles and not perfectly circular around the equator either. Putting this into the formula, you get (4 divided by 3) x 3.141592653 x (6738 x 6738 x 6738) cubic kilometres, or 1281390881653 km3. Now back to the important problem of how many sheets of A4 paper are needed to cover this planet. The formula for the surface area of a sphere is 4r2. Given Earth's radius in metres, which is about 6738000, that formula gets us the result of 570521318634582 m 2. Since an A4 piece of paper has an area of 0.062667 m2, that means you would need almost 9104015169620089 sheets to cover Earth. Now a couple of questions for you to answer! 1. What is the volume of a piece of A4 paper, assuming it to be 0.1 mm thick? 2. If a square metre of paper weighs 80 grammes, how dense is that paper given the answer to question (1)? 3. What is the formula for the surface area of a cylinder?