I was listening to radiolab and they mentioned that bacteria are usually 100s of times bigger than viruses. I’ve never really had a good sense of the relative sizes of microscopic things, but always wanted to.
So if a virus was human sized, would a bacteria be building-sized? Would an atom be the size of a penny? Basically, if you were to map the microscopic world onto the visible world, what would things be?
In: Biology
Part of the struggle is that atoms are so small that the wavelength of light makes it impossible to directly observe them with our eyes. So we are stuck with a perception of size based on our own experiences but that doesn’t necessarily relate to the size of atomic structures. The best we have been able to do with visualizing atoms is by tracing them out. Things get more strange when you consider the structure of an atom, atoms are mostly empty space, which sounds asinine when you consider everything we think of as matter is made up of these things. Take the simplest isotope of hydrogen, if the proton (so 1 proton 1 electron [protium] vs 1 proton 1 neutron 1 electron [deutron]) is the size of a basketball then the electron orbits **two miles away**.
So, suffice to say, the size difference between anything observable through a microscope and an atom is very large. An atom is .1 nanometer, a virus is 100 nanometers, from the magic of the metric system we can deduce that a virus is 1000 times larger than an atom. I am about 2 meters tall, so if I am an atom then the virus would be 2000 meters. That is very nearly the height of some rocky mountains if I am standing on the high plain directly adjacent to them.
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