I’ve mentioned before that I’m bigger than a breadbox. But that description will have to change. It’s not that I’m appreciably smaller (though I have lost some mass from running a net energy deficit the last several lunar cycles), it’s that I now have a much geekier description to use.
A colleague has been setting up a pulsed laser system, in anticipation of getting into frequency combs for optical time transfer using fibers as well as eventually doing optical clocks. And, frankly, he dropped the ball. He got the system running and announced it had a pulse, but neglected to shout “Give my creature life!” or “It … is … ALIVE!” at any stage of the work. Anyway, we were watching him tweak the system and were looking at the signal on an oscilloscope, and got to the point where we wanted a much larger bandwidth, so we started looking for the spectrum analyzer.
“Where is it?”
“I think it’s in the lab. I saw it around here somewhere.”
[Group members begin to fan out]
“Oh, there it is, behind Tom.”
I had been blocking the view of it. Ergo, I can now be described as being “bigger than a spectrum analyzer.”
I have been known to be able to block the view of complete buildings, but that doesn’t make me bigger than that building. I think I can call you bigger than a spectrum analyzer (now I know in what magnitute of volume I have to estimate a spectrum analyzer), but the ‘ergo’ is not logically correct.
But at least since your period of energy deficit you are not massive enough to deflect fotons coming from behind you so people in front of you can see them.
I was standing right next to it, though, so I was not merely the same angular extent from a particular perspective.