Felipe Pereira Goncalves

January 24, 2013, 8:30am

The Unf**kable Frontier: Q&A with Felipe Pereira Goncalves

The limits of the human mind have something to do with really big numbers. There’s no insight into knowing that Earth is one hundred million miles away from the Sun, for example -- it’s just real far. Partly, it’s a matter of scale. Cornell mathematician Steve Strogatz tries to rein in this vastness in his description of the Sagan Planet Walk, a scaled replica of the solar system in Ithaca, NY. There, Earth is the size of a pea and just a couple of steps away from the sun, itself the size of a serving plate.