While good to have for reference, I didn’t find the enormous tables on Wikipedia helpful. Using the mass of the Earth as an example, I have no intuition for the number 1024 : it’s just ten apples with twenty-four smaller apples floating next to them (relevant xkcd). And I don’t think memorizing these numbers, with spaced repetition or otherwise, is all that helpful for intuition-building.
For astronomical distances, what I have found helpful is to do everything in terms of the speed of light (108.5 m/s = a foot per nanosecond). The sun is 8 minutes = 500 seconds away. The moon is 1.5 seconds away. Jupiter is 45 minutes away, and doubles every step to Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
For the circumference of the Earth, the distance from the pole to the equator is a nice, round, 10,000 km. (Remarkably convenient coincidence!)
For masses, use the density of water: the Sun and all the gas giants are the same density as water. Earth is the density of rock, about √10 that of water. The density of metal is 10 times water.
One thing that’s useful for me is to draw analogies. For instance, the earth is about as big compared to the kilogram as benzene (1.3×10−25 kg) is small.
While good to have for reference, I didn’t find the enormous tables on Wikipedia helpful. Using the mass of the Earth as an example, I have no intuition for the number 1024 : it’s just ten apples with twenty-four smaller apples floating next to them (relevant xkcd). And I don’t think memorizing these numbers, with spaced repetition or otherwise, is all that helpful for intuition-building.
For astronomical distances, what I have found helpful is to do everything in terms of the speed of light (108.5 m/s = a foot per nanosecond). The sun is 8 minutes = 500 seconds away. The moon is 1.5 seconds away. Jupiter is 45 minutes away, and doubles every step to Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
For the circumference of the Earth, the distance from the pole to the equator is a nice, round, 10,000 km. (Remarkably convenient coincidence!)
For masses, use the density of water: the Sun and all the gas giants are the same density as water. Earth is the density of rock, about √10 that of water. The density of metal is 10 times water.
One thing that’s useful for me is to draw analogies. For instance, the earth is about as big compared to the kilogram as benzene (1.3×10−25 kg) is small.