To start getting comfortable with understanding the body you are driving around, you’ll need an intuitive understanding of the size of things.
Let’s start with these 3, each one is ten times bigger than the smaller one.
SIDENOTE: If you are struggling to develop this intuition I’d purchase these 4 things, all 10x bigger than the smaller:
– 1 mm ball bearing
– 1 cm ball bearing
– 10 cm softball (normal men’s softball is close to this)
– 1m exercise ball (40 inches)
Let’s add some more and line them up – it looks like this (not to scale):
The table version of itlooks like this:
To travel here we’ll need to shrink, so use your imagination and channel some “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” vibes. First stop: 100,000 times smaller to “get” the cell and then we’ll shrink 100,000,000 (100 million) times smaller to “get” atoms.
SIDENOTE: the range of the individual items listed, can vary widely, but giving a concrete example helps build a framework for later understanding the nuances.
1st stop: 100,000 times smaller
In this realm:
You’d lay down with your feet at the bottom of Arizona and the top of your head would be in Helena Montana, that’s a 17 hour drive at 60 mph even if you could drive as the crow flies.
- A grain of salt would be the size of a football field.
- A hair strand is the size of the basketball area and
- That exercise ball is the size of a cell.
- Inside the cell:
- Bacteria would be the size of the softball
- Viruses are the size of the small marble
- Proteins are the size of the grain of salt
- Molecules are the size of a hair
So remember, you’ve shrunk yourself 100,000 times for these items to appear this size. Now holding a cell in your arms the size of an exercise ball under the shade of a human hair you can start to imagine a map of how they fit together, like this: wow!
Last stop: 100,000,000 times smaller
Note how crazy it is that this is a real dimension that exists inside your body…
In this realm:
- Proteins are the size of the exercise ball and fits on your desk now
- Molecules are the size of your computer mouse
- Atoms are the size of your fingertip
- The smallest atoms (like hydrogen) are the size of a dust speck
SIDENOTE: oh by the way to get down to the protons & electrons? they won’t show up until you zoom in 10,000 more times to the femtometer scale the equivalent distance of turning a grain of salt into a school bus, so for a working knowledge this will definitely get you by especially since there is little interesting scenery along the way & mostly wide open space.
Use these two journeys as reference points as you are learning anything about the body and you’ll find a big difference in your understanding, retention & the depth of learning you’ll have for the material. For example: cellular respiration, oh yeah I remember going to that place, 100,000 land, beautiful scenery. Wait a minute, learning about drugs, I’ve been there, 100,000,000-land, I love that place – freaky weird monsters there!
Watch out!
There are so many references and labels, on top of seeing varying sizes for the examples, you’ll also see the measurements used interchangeably: micro, nano, picometers, powers of 10. If you use the data-dense table it should give you a good start. In general, if you chill and come back to this analogy until it is solid in your intuition the nuances will be get easier and easier to handle.
Also for a more intuitive bonus on the powers of 10, use google maps and start with your house at maximum zoom of 2m and you can zoom out 7 powers to the whole map – cool.
