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Coolest. Thing. Ever.
Oct. 17th, 2010 08:25 am
Everyone should see this, because it's amazing.
It's a flash animation demonstrating the scale of microscopic things. Sounds boring? It's not. Really. Just click the link - at the bottom of the diagram there's a slide you can move from left to right. It's pretty incredible.
I had a pretty good education in science at school. Not superior, but pretty good. But there was one question that confused me and I was always afraid to ask it because it seemed like such a silly question. See, once you start talking about cells and bacteria in biology class, and molecules and atoms in physics and chemistry, every teacher is talking about things so tiny you can never see them. I could never get my head around the concept of scale for things so tiny. I understood, for example, that living cells are made up of molecules, so a molecule must be smaller than a cell. But then I'd get to the relative sizes of different types of molecule - DNA vs water, for instance - and I'd get lost again. This diagram demonstrates it so clearly! I so wish this had been around when I was in school.
It's a flash animation demonstrating the scale of microscopic things. Sounds boring? It's not. Really. Just click the link - at the bottom of the diagram there's a slide you can move from left to right. It's pretty incredible.
I had a pretty good education in science at school. Not superior, but pretty good. But there was one question that confused me and I was always afraid to ask it because it seemed like such a silly question. See, once you start talking about cells and bacteria in biology class, and molecules and atoms in physics and chemistry, every teacher is talking about things so tiny you can never see them. I could never get my head around the concept of scale for things so tiny. I understood, for example, that living cells are made up of molecules, so a molecule must be smaller than a cell. But then I'd get to the relative sizes of different types of molecule - DNA vs water, for instance - and I'd get lost again. This diagram demonstrates it so clearly! I so wish this had been around when I was in school.
