how big are atoms compared to viruses compared to bacteria etc?

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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

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

this might also help conceptualise the sizes. A bacteria is a single cell, a virus works inside cells on the DNA/RNA so it is small enough to be inside the cell and multiply many times in there. That’s what makes it hard to counter viruses as they’re hidden inside cells. And lastly atoms are the building blocks for elements, and these are made up from subatomic particles (positive, negative and neutral) that determines which one they are

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