Intuitively understanding the size of an atom

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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 twenty-five meters of dome-height at the center of the play-field. 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.

If you build a humongous model of a human hair with a diameter equivalent to the width of a soccer field (~50m), then the model carbon atoms in that humongous model of a human are pretty much exactly the size of a human hair (~0.1mm).

The carbon atoms in the real hair (and everywhere else) are about ~0.2nm in diameter.

It's the same ratio!

  • 50m / 0.1mm = 500 000
  • 0.1mm / 0.2nm = 500 000

See?

Why this works

Unlike other comparisons this for once works because
the size of a hair and the size of a soccer-field both
still fall into the range of our everyday human experience.

Also choose one magnification level and stick with it for as much as possible.
Do not jump around with magnification levels wildly.

What not works (but what usually is done)

Shift one side of the comparison a bit (like making model atoms the size of marbles ~1cm) and
the other side falls way out of human everyday experience (model hair 5km diameter).
The comparison becomes completely useless as a means for intuitive understanding.

In other words:
Using a 1cm diameter marble for the size of a magnified atom
this magnifies any structures that are before magnification barely big enough to be seen by human eye,
like our 0.1mm diamater hair as reference, to scales so big that
they can no longer be fathomed by human intuition (5km).
At least not fathomed in a 2D or 3D way.
Try to picture a 5x5=5km² flat empty area without some reference as an aid.
This is not really possible.

Related

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