So the next time you're feeling small, try measuring yourself in Planck Lengths, and you might just feel like a giant. Which, incidentally, has nothing to do with planking. But our smallest available yardstick is known as the Planck Length. Smaller still, a carbon atom is a mere seventy picometres, while a quark, not to be confused with a quack, at one femtometre, is a million times smaller than a nanometre.Īnything smaller can be measured in attometres, zeptometres, yoctometres. The groove on a CD is a hundred and twenty nanometres deep, while DNA is just three nanometres thick. And red blood cells are even smaller - below a millionth of a metre, and we are approaching nano-land, where really small stuff is measured in nanometres. So we can say that an electron is lighter than a quark, but we can not say that it is smaller than quark concludes Prof. Physicists can not yet compare whats larger: a quark, Higgs boson or an electron.
Beyond the scope of the naked eye, white blood cells are just ten micrometres across. The diameter of the proton is about as much as a millimetre divided by a thousand billion (10-15m). The smallest particle visible to the naked eye is a tenth of a millimetre. For instance, an ant is four millimetres long. Ever had one of those days where you feel small and insignificant? Well take heart, there are plenty of things smaller than you.
0 kommentar(er)
