Steve Barnes' World of Happiness

Blog

Atoms to scale.

(Science Week, Day 5!)

I'm accustomed to seeing videos where cascadingly larger zoom-outs reveal the Earth to be minuscule with respect to Jupiter, which is minuscule compared to the Sun, which is minuscule compared to other stars. There are happily enough of those that I feel halfway able to "grasp" those sizes.

I haven't seen much of the opposite: videos meant to convey a sense of the sizes of small things, and at what point the world of fingernails, eyelashes and dust would "meet" the realm of cells, or the respectively smaller realm of molecules, if you were gradually shrinking. This quick video from CERN is about that.

(The scale at the bottom increments by factors of ten: one metre, a tenth of a metre, a hundredth of a metre, and so on. The final increment, one femtometre, is one quadrillionth of a metre.)