My answer to the coastline paradox!

Nerd here…

the maximum a coastline can be measured to is NOT infinity like some people generally believe! If you could measure the bond length between two atoms and know how many atoms make up the exact mark where land meets the sea of your given country (generally high tide mark), you could work it out. For example, the bond length of two average atoms in the earth’s continental crust is about 0.000000000161 metres. Then multiply that by how many atoms make up the earth’s high tide mark in a line, and you have the absolute maximum that country’s coastline can be measured as! So if there are 15 trillion (15,000,000,000,000 atoms) making up the high tide mark, it’d be 2,413 metres. This also means that it would be much much more than 15 trillion atoms in the coastline’s length.

You may ask yourself “but surely you can use half a bond length as your unit of measurement to get an EVEN BIGGER coastline” but that is false because the bonds between atoms are generally shown as straight lines, so you could, but then you’d end up with the same number. To get your head around that second part, imagine a straight line that is 4cm long. Multiply it by 1 because there is 1 lot of 4cm on the line, and you get that line as 4cm. If you split it into 2 parts of 2cm, you multiply that together to get the same length; same applies for measuring beyond the bond length of the atoms.