[highfrequency]

> The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static—we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size.

Very cool article. For example: butterflies accumulate a positive charge when beating their wings, which causes pollen to jump through the air toward them when they land on flowers.

[Swizec]

Similar to this, one of the most mind-blowing papers I’ve read was Life at Low Reynold’s Number about how at the microorganism level water is virtually solid and inertia does not exist.

https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf https://swizec.com/blog/week-9-life-at-low-reynolds-number/

[hermitcrab]

When you are very big (like an elephant), gravity is all important and surface tension barely matters.

When you are very small (like an ant), it is the other way around.

Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, “… a rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” So wrote J.B.S. Haldane in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27082

[MrLeap]

Inertia doesn't exist? Wow that's hard to visualize. Perhaps the world does converge on cellular automata as you zoom in

[tommiegannert]

The same question scales outwards. Are there forces taking over from gravity at galactic scale? Like, perhaps the galaxy filaments and voids come about due to something we can't even comprehend. It seems unlikely that humans just happen to be working with the force at the largest "scale."

How complicated would it be for a small insect to explain gravity, if they're not normally affected by it in their daily routine?

I recently thought about something similar: it seems like at certain scales, things turn into spheres, based on applicable forces. And then there are in-between regions with chaos. Atoms seem mostly round. Humans are not. If planets and stars are at the next spherical scale, are there even larger structures out there that once again show spherical nature, once you're past galaxies, clusters and filaments?

[hnuser123456]

Since black holes grow with their radius proportional to mass (not volume), larger black holes are less dense. The current estimates for the size and mass of the universe fits right on the line of that curve of critical density.

[deciplex]

The universe itself, if bounded, might be a hypersphere.

[tomcam]

Username particularly appropriate