I would like to imagine between the smallest specimen of living matter and the non-living, specifically protons but also electrons and their constituent parts.
/ My question arose while reading the quantum physics story. Book: ‘Helgoland’ by Carlo Rovelli.
Answer
Dear Marc
Below I outline the size of a bacterium to a virus particle to the size of an atom.
Let us assume that the bacterium is one meter long, then the virus particle is about 1 cm in size. In reality, a bacterium is about 2 micrometers in size (average) (=0.000 002 meters) and a virus is about 0.02 micrometers or 20 nanometers in size.
Atoms are another 100 times smaller than a virus, so on our scale an atom is about one tenth of a millimeter, so the thickness of a human hair. Then if we look at the atom that consists of a nucleus surrounded by the electron cloud, which in our model has a size of the order of 1/10 of a millimeter, then the nucleus is another 1000 times smaller.
I hope this gives an overview/insight into the relative size of things.
An interesting book about this is “Powers of Ten” published by Natuur en Techniek (Scientific Library) in 1985. The book can be found in a city library.
Regards
Answered by
Prof. dr. Dirk Vanderzande
Agoralaan University Campus Building D BE-3590 Diepenbeek
http://www.uhasselt.be/
.