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
Atoms: 0.1 nanometers.
Viruses: 100 nanometers.
Bacteria: 10,000 nanometers.
So if virus was human-sized, a bacterium would be skyscraper sized, and an atom would be ant sized. Since everything is made of atoms, at that scale you WOULD see the atom “building blocks” of everything; objects would look like they’re made of [ant-sized balls](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0b/03/68/0b0368f4d6e909a6c0d31c4bfb07c7cc.gif) / [pixelated](https://mae.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/styles/large_scaled/public/2023-07/atoms%20with%20labels.jpg?itok=l2wYFPaW) like in Minecraft.
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