the coastline paradox.
In: Earth Science
Consider a 1 meter x 1 meter blanket, what’s the surface area? 1 meter^2 right?
Well now what if its a quilt? It has a foot print of 1 m^2 but the lumps and bumps mean the actual quilt has more than 1 m^2 of surface area to it
What if you zoom in even further? The threads don’t form a perfectly smooth plate so there’s even more area from going up/down over each thread, and the bodies of those threads aren’t perfectly smooth so there’s even more area there!
The end result is you starting with a blanket that clearly had a surface area of 1 m^2 and ended up with an answer far higher than 1 by the time you were done
Similarly coastlines look smooth from a distance but get really jagged as you start getting closer. If you’re just counting how many 1 km long lines you can put in a row against the coastline you’ll get a different number than if you use 100 km long lines or 10 meter long lines, and if you start looking at millimeter long lines you can fit far far far more than the 1 km long line estimate would have led you to believe because they fit into all the nooks and crannies that the longer lines passed right over.
The paradox is that you can get wildly different measurements while measuring the same thing just depending on the size of the unit you are using. Increasing the precision of your measurement doesn’t improve accuracy, it fundamentally changes the value being measured
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