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Robert.Boston

Model S VIN P01536
Moderator
For those who don't read XKCD, you're missing a treat. Here's a segment from this week's "What If?" segment:
In the US, we measure fuel economy in miles/gallon—which could just as easily be written as gallons/mile. (This reciprocal form has some advantages. It’s popular in Europe, where it’s expressed as liters per 100 kilometers.)

But regardless of which units you use, there’s something strange going on here. Miles are units of length, and gallons are volume—which is [FONT=MathJax_Main]length[/FONT][SUP][FONT=MathJax_Main]3[/FONT][/SUP]. So gallons/mile is [FONT=MathJax_Main]length[/FONT][SUP][FONT=MathJax_Main]3[/FONT][/SUP][FONT=MathJax_Main]/length[/FONT]. That’s just [FONT=MathJax_Main]length[/FONT][SUP][FONT=MathJax_Main]2[/FONT][/SUP].

Gas mileage is measured in square meters.

You can even plug it into Wolfram|Alpha, and it’ll tell you that 20 MPG is about 0.1 square millimeters (roughly the area of two pixels on a computer screen).
Unit cancellation is weird.

Ok, so what’s the physical interpretation of that number? Is there one?

It turns out there is! If you took all the gas you burned on a trip and stretched it out into a thin tube along your route, 0.1 square millimeters would be the cross-sectional area of that tube.
 
Reminds me of calculus paradoxes:

Zeno of Elea was a pupil and friend of the philosopher Parmenides, and lived between 490 BC to about 425 BC. Zeno’s philosophy, known as monism, centers around the theory that “all is one.” That is, the many things that appear to exist individually are merely a single reality. Zeno proposed a number of paradoxes to support his argument against the idea that the world contains more than one thing. These paradoxes are derived from the assumption that if a magnitude can be divided then it can be divided infinitely often. One of these paradoxes, known as The Dichotomy, is described by Aristotle in his work Physics:
“There is no motion because that which is moved must arrive at the middle of its course before it arrives at the end.”

The idea behind the paradox is this: Suppose you would like to shoot an arrow at a target:

In order to reach its destination, the arrow must first travel half the distance to the target. Once there, half the distance still remains. From this position, the arrow must now travel half the remaining distance, and so on. Clearly, there is always some small amount of distance remaining between the tip of the arrow and the target. So, the arrow must always travel half that remaining distance first, thereby leaving the other half still to go. This argument compels us to conclude that the arrow cannot EVER reach the target. Of course, experience tells us that the arrow DOES reach the target! (All who disagree are welcome to stand in front of the target.) Hence we arrive at the paradox.
 
I still admire the fact that the ancient Greek arrived at the idea that something like atoms must exist - just by thinking! ἄτομος (atomos) -- uncut, indivisible. from 1 /A "not" and 5114 /tomṓteros, "to cut".
 
For those who don't read XKCD, you're missing a treat. Here's a segment from this week's "What If?" segment:

...
Ok, so what’s the physical interpretation of that number? Is there one?

It turns out there is! If you took all the gas you burned on a trip and stretched it out into a thin tube along your route, 0.1 square millimeters would be the cross-sectional area of that tube.
That reminded me of an exercise we did in an engineering class involving estimating the tread wear lifetime of a tire and the decrease in radius. It came out to the tire leaving a somewhat patchy stripe of rubber one molecule thick behind it on the road.