Big elephants

If you proportionally double the size of an elephant, how much will its weight
increase?

weight is proportional to volume, not area.

If the elephant eats itself will it vanish or be twice as big?
Mari

It will weigh twice as much, but be invisible.

Anyone know what a "Klein bottle" is? Sort of like a Mobius strip. I suddenly
thought of a Klein elephant. If you stick the trunk in the..., oh let's not go
there...

I've wasted hours sitting in front of a real life Klein bottle. It's just,
well, incredible. Am I right in thinking that a *true* Klein bottle can't
actually be made in three dimensions? Can it be done in 4
dimensions, or 5 or 6 or 7 or...?

Mark
The Squirrel Lover

somebody explain please - an internet link would be better... this
sounds facinating (even to my mathimatically redundant brain)

Jon, try this (there may be better explanations but it's the best one
I've found after a few minutes of searching):-

http://www.kleinbottle.com/whats_a_klein_bottle.htm

Also,

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/55176.html
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/55185.html

These last two (and the links from them) helped to answer a lot of the
questions I had! Expecially about 4 dimensions and so on.

Mark
The Squirrel Lover

Related question: Drop an earthworm down a mineshaft, and it will probably survive. Drop
an elephant down a mineshaft (assuming the shaft is wide enough), and it'll splatter at the
bottom. Why?

surface area to volume ratios... if you halve somethings size you don't
halve its surface area. The best visual explanation I've seen of this
(for kids) is by cutting an orange in half - it's obvious tha the juicy bit
is extra surface area yet the mass has just halved.

Oh yeah.. the other half of the answer is wind resistance, which is
directly related to surface area..

That's right. Some people who own pet rodents don't seem to understand this, though. They
think, 'well since it's such a small and weak animal compared to me, it can't survive large
drops, so I have to make sure it never drops very far.' While a mouse, say, will not find the
experience of dropping 4 feet particularly pleasant, it's not going to injure the mouse at all
unless it's a REALLY stupid one that doesn't even try to land on its feet. I had a hamster
once that would climb to the top of its cage, start swinging about on the ceiling bars, lose its
footing and fall down again. Scaled up to human size it would have looked very dangerous.
But clearly for my hamster it was so little of a problem that it kept doing it! Mind you, I did
have a rather stupid hamster that would walk off the edge of my hand (with my hand a few
inches above a table maybe) and then land on its nose.