What is the meaning of "than"?

Question

When I am reading Philosophy and Simulation, I encountered the word:

"than"

Normally, I know the meaning of the word but this time I could not understand what the meaning of than in this sentence. Could you explain it for me? Could you give me synonym for this word in the context?

The context of word is below:

This other field, of course, takes for granted the properties of molecules themselves, treating them as solid spheres endowed with the capacity to collide and redistribute their energy, so another scientific field needs to account for the emergence of these properties in terms of their even smaller components (electrons, protons, neutrons). These three fields are, respectively, classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and quantum mechanics.

Lattice-gas automata operate at the same level of scale than statistical mechanics and borrows some of its methods. In particular, statistical mechanics must deal with entire molecular populations in order to account for processes lilce gradient degradation so it cannot deal with molecules individually: even a perfectly rigid sphere has six degrees of freedom being capable of changing its position and momentum in three different directions.

Answer 1

The word "than" is used to compare two unequal things.

For example:

George is better than Dave at baseball.

I like blue better than red.

There is more sun today than yesterday.

In this case, it's not properly used since the things being compared are equal. It is comparing "Lattice-gas automata" and "statistical mechanics", and the sentence says that those two things "operate at the same level of scale". So the proper word to use would be "as" instead of "than".