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How Small Are Atoms?

by Jason Major on April 26, 2012

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Here on Universe Today we often discuss things that exist on the atomic and sub-atmonic scale. Even though astronomy is concerned with very big things that happen over very, very large distances and time spans, the reality is that our Universe is driven by events occurring on the tiny atomic scale.

We all know atoms are really small (and the particles inside them are even smaller.) But… how small are they, really? To help answer that question, here’s a neat little animation from TEDEducation, presented by Jonathan Bergmann and Cognitive Media.

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(That’s one big grapefruit!)

No fruits were harmed in the making of this video.

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About

A graphic designer living in Providence, RI, Jason writes about astronomy and space exploration on his blog Lights In The Dark, Discovery News and here on Universe Today.

Tagged as: Atoms, education, how small are atoms, Johnathan Bergman, Physics, Science, TED, TEDed

  • http://twitter.com/Mihirr_Panchaal Mihir Panchal

    That’s a better video and much more relational than the other way of putting things if many videos.. like zooming out to ever greater distances.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/4ERDU5R74VC6H2JF6XMSEJS4EQ The Goon Squad

    This reminds me of a question I was asked when I was a graduate student teaching an organic chemistry lab. The student asked if he looked in a microscope [a common optical microscope] if he could see atoms? It was the first time is dawned upon me that students really have no idea how small atoms are.

  • Lord Haw-Haw.

    Scientist and author Don Lincoln of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory wrote in his book “The Quantum Frontier, The Large Hadron Collider”:

    “Atoms are really, really tiny. If you were to line up atoms ‘edge to edge,’ it would take 10 million to make up a single millimeter or 250 million to make up a single inch.”

    What the late Dr. Carl Sagan would call……”The realm of the very small!”

  • dw declare

    empty space? really? or is there something even smaller lurking between the nucleus and electrons that we haven’t been able to detect yet? perhaps something akin to dark matter or dark energy.

    • Torbjörn Larsson

      Not anything that will make an impact on daily life, there isn’t much room for something that has energy and entropy. The standard cosmology put a stop to such phenomena.

      But tiny effects, surely. Solid state physics have the most alluring quasiparticles, for one.

      And then you have all the toys of the rest of cosmology to play with (inflation, multiverses … or not, et cetera).

  • dw declare

    empty space? really? or is there something even smaller lurking between the nucleus and electrons that we haven’t been able to detect yet? perhaps something akin to dark matter or dark energy.

  • http://profiles.google.com/kenlord Ken Lord

    Did you see the gorilla? … awesome.

  • Torbjörn Larsson

    How small? Small enough.

  • danangel

    This from NASA is a help: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html

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