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

Question

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

Answer 1

The Covid-19 us looks to be around 80-120nm in diameter, let’s call it 100 nm

Look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_radii_of_the_elements_(data_page)#/media/File:Atomic_radii_up_to_zinc.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_radii_of_the_elements_(data_page)#/media/File:Atomic_radii_up_to_zinc.png) for atomic radius, the area from around 50 to 250 pm so a diameter of 100 to 500 pm

1 nm = 1000 pm so the atomic diameter is around 0.1 to 0.5 nanometers.

So a Covid-19 virus is in the order of 1000 to 200 atoms in diameter depending on which atom you look at.