I was perusing a back issue of Physics Today [1], reading an article about events at the Large Hadron Collider [2], when I noticed the word, “femtobarn”. It was defined as 10-39 sq.cm. or a decimal followed by 38 zeros then a one. This is pretty small.
As a midwesterner, I thought I knew the size of a barn. So I multiplied out the femto (you know, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-) to get the quadrillion times larger 10-24sq.cm. This is a barn? I had to Google this, and found a clear article at Stanford defining it [3] for lay-folk.
In brief, physicists in the 1940’s were often discussing the cross-sectional area of the Uranium Nucleus. They thought of calling it the Oppenheimer (too many syllables) or the Bethe (too likely to be heard as Beta). Well, most of the research was being done in the midwest, and slamming protons into this target made them think of tossing tomatoes at a barn. The name “barn” was used in a reviewed article, accepted, and it stuck. Now, why femtobarns as the standard unit? It’s just practical for their purposes, like kilometers or megabytes.
By now, if you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, “why should we care?” Sure, it’s fun to say “femtobarn”, but what use is it in everyday life?
The point is that the world we live in is made up of so many of these tiny and obscure things that only specialists ever get around to knowing about. Atoms and nuclei are just theories, but these theories are made up of very many observations of small things that all appear to support them. Sure, the Rutherford atomic theory (“plum pudding” model) was overthrown much like the Copernican solar system (circular orbits) was centuries before, but the roots of these theories are still strong.
The trap of arguing faith-based creation with science is that the explanation of science requires understanding, not just acceptance. A Creationist can sway his audience with a quick and apparently reasonable sound bite, but it takes many levels of understanding and explanation to explain to innumerates or science novices what is wrong with (or unreasoned about) the Reasonable Statement.
There is a subtle difference between randomness and chaos. There is a distinct correlation between complexity and disorder. Calculus is based on the understanding that everthing can be defined in terms of smaller things, and that all smaller things add up to bigger things. This must not be as obvious as it sounds, because Creationists won’t see what molecular biology has to do with speciation, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle [4] with cellular mutation.
Look how long it took to simply describe a measurement unit that is as familiar to nuclear physicist as a kilometer is to the rest of us. But now I need to go mow my half-million yotta [5]barns of lawn.
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