Light-Picosecond Ruler - Lightspeed in your Hands!

Have you ever wanted to harness light-speed?
Get to grips with the vastness of the universe?
Or just sound really clever while underlining your 
paper about the mysteries of the cosmos?

Well now you can!

Meet the light-picosecond ruler:

• sleek
• practical
• black (like the endless space between everything in the universe!) depending of course on your filament colour choices, maybe the endless nothingness is bright orange!
• 330 light-picoseconds in 3.3 increments

Ok, ok, you might be wondering:

What is a ruler?

No, i know you know what a ruler is.
It is is an instrument used to make length measurements, whereby a length is read 
from a series of markings called "rules" along an edge of the device.

Or is it?

What if i told you it is actually a tool to measure also time.

What do you mean Ive already lost you? Oh… Ive lost it you say…

Well, let me explain:

In the beginning there was nothing (possibly).

And then there was light and time. (possibly and maybe some gravitation)

And some time and light later a whole lot of other stuff. (probably dinosaurs in lab coats)

The stuff is not important for now.

Light is fast you know. Incredibly fast. Most people have heard about light-speed.

But what is light-speed?

It is :

• 670,616,629 mph
• 1,079,252,848.8 km/h
• 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight
• 11,802,852,670.4 bathtub lengths/minute
• 8,616,091,891,668.801 football fields/month
• 686,154,227,009,260,748,800 banana lengths/year

So, what does this tell us?

• light is fast
• people like to measure stuff
• math is fun
• their are calculators for anything online
• I am impressed, you are still here reading this
• Length is relative to culture, custom, standard or the eye of the observer (and the speed of you in the relation to the whole Einstein thingy)
• Time is pretty universal on the other hand, well mostly or so i just claimed at least

 

But those are all very big numbers, so how about we went smaller you say?
 

Thats why you are actually here, you want to know about the picosecond, eh?

Well lets get them, in a descending order, from a human perspective:

• Century = 100 years
• Decade = 10 years
• Year = 12 months (~12.37 luna months, but i digress)
• Month = ~30.436875 days
• Day = 24 hours
• Hour = 60 minutes
• Minute = 60 seconds
• Second = 1000 milliseconds
• Millisecond = 1000 microseconds
• Microsecond = 1000 nanoseconds
• Nanosecond = 1000 picoseconds
• And 1 Picosecond is one trillionth of a second (0.000 000 000 001 seconds)

Are you happy now? You now possess the knowledge about the picosecond.
Congratulation! Class dismissed.

What? You actually want to know more? You want this whole thing to have some meaning?

Ok, come in here

     /|
    / |
   /__|______
  |  __  __  |
  | |  ||  | | 
  | |__||__| |
  |  __  __()|
  | |  ||  | |
  | |  ||  | |
  | |__||__| |
  |__________|  
  You step inside.
  ...
  You hear a click.
  ...
  A single lightbulb eluminates on the ceiling.
  ...
  You are in a closett.
  ...

Ok, now nobody can hear us.

You now already know that distance and time are relative.

The thing is you can measure the one with the other and the other with the one.

Now you are starting to wonder if these two are not in fact the same.

Dont you dare ask about gravitation, wave particles and how much coffee i had!!!

We can measure the speed of light but only on a round trip (from A>B to A again)

We dont know if its faster on the way out or slower on the way back or the other way around.

But this is beside the point, the point is: we do have a number!

And that number is 1,079,252,848.8 km/h (or terafurlongs, bananas and all that).

But you cant hold 1,079,252,848.8 km in your hands! 
That are 361,549,704.348  unprinted 1kg filament spools you need to unspool.

So what is a madmen to do?

Make it smaller!!

So you take the light-year to light-months to light-weeks to light-days and so on

and finally you have it.

The light-picosecond!

And 330 of those make a nice sized ruler for your pocket.

Maybe someone will make one of the SI-units fit around light speed someday, you never know 
what madmen are out there.

Now you know the whole truth, the whole dirty truth about pocket rulers

and all the timey-whimey stuff and some of my madness.

Why are you still here?

Start your printer and go out into the sunlight!

 

And dont think about how many rulers can fit between you and the sun…

 

Print Settings:

This print has been optimised for 0.2 nozzles.

Their are 2 file variants:

• Multi-colour (haven't a machine to try it, so let me know if there are problems)
• Single colour

Walls/Bottoms/Tops: As many as you can make fit, probably at least 2

Infill: Optional

Filament: Any, preferred black or bright orange (you never know….)

Scaling: Better not. That could break the universe…

Layer height: To get a nice inclination it is better to go smaller (again, i know),

                             adaptive Layer height or similar is your friend.

 

History:

31.12.24: Release of V 1.0

31.12.24: Typo correction, because someone was sleep deprived