Monday 11 March 2013

Getting the scale right

Your eyes are very good at adjusting to scale - most of the time. But there are exceptions. As someone who trained as a chemist I am used to crystals and I immediately recognised this as group of gypsum crystals growing inside a cavity in a lump of rock. I then noticed a few orange specs and wondered what they were. It was only when I had clicked on the picture to get a larger image that I realised that my brain had been fooled.
In fact the biggest crystal found so far is 12 metres long, four metres long and weighs about 50,000 kilograms. The picture is from the National Geographic and the Giant Crystal cave is in Mexico

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