How big is an Atom?
Channel: Mechadense — Realm of Mechadense
Date: 2014-12-21

500 000 : 1 a good standard magnification for visualisation of invisible small things.


When you want to instinctively understand robotic production in the small it is good when you're able to imagine the size of atoms. But atoms are unimaginable small – aren't they?
Well – that is the common Opinion. But let's look at the matter more closely.
To make something intuitively graspable one should only use things from daily experience for comparison.
As illustration-attempt often an orange is blown up to the size of the earth. But that won't help you – then you need to imagine the size of the earth – the problem got only shifted.

So we need a magnification factor that at the same time changes atoms to barely visble model-atoms and doesn't change barely visible stuff to unimaginable sizes in the scaled up model.

The thickness of a hair and the width of a soccer field is astonishlingly well suited for illustration of the size of an atom.

A carbon atom has a diameter of about a fifth of a millionth millimiter – a fifth of a nanometer. A hair has about a tenth of a millimeter thickness. It is fivehundretthousend times thicker. A magnification of fivehundredthousend blows up atoms to visible size model-atoms with hair-diameter. That fulfills our first condition – atoms get visible.
A Hair has as said about a tenth of a millimeter diameter. A soccer field has about fifty meters width. It is fivethousand times wider. The same fivehundredthousendfold magnificvation blows up a small but visible hair to the still imaginable size of a soccer field. That fulfills our second condition – barely visible stuff won't be blown up to unimaginable sizes.

With those two sizes of hair and soccer field one can construct a wonderful take home message that reads as follows:

„A model of a hair as thick as a soccer filed wide has model-atoms as big as a real hair is thick.“

Now, pluck yourself a Hair and look at it. Imagine a magnified model of the torn of end was built. Would be interesting – wouldn't it? This model was buried halfway such that it runs vertically into ground at the sidelines and that it reaches twentyfive meters of dome-hight at the center of the playfield. When you stand on this soccer field in front of the fractured surface and you hold a real  hair against tremendous model then you see: The model-atoms of the giant hair have the diameter of a real hair.

I hope you adjudge this comparison well enough to be able to say that you're can now imagine the size of atoms.