From Organisms to Atoms: Visualizing Biological Scale

追加: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]I want us to get an idea of relative sizes. One of the crazy things about biology is that sometimes we're looking at large things like ecosystems, we can imagine them. They're large, you can see them with your eyes. But when we're looking at the cell, we're looking at things that are very small and it's so small that we can't see them. So sometimes it's hard to imagine them. But if it's from millimeters to meters, we can see those with our eyes. Like if you imagine a little dot of a period at the end of a sentence, that's about a millimeter. That's 10 to the negative three meters.

[00:00:32]So the next is micrometer.

[00:00:34]Imagine anything with the micro that um you see there. That's having to do with microscopic that you can see with a microscope, a light microscope. And those are 10 to the negative six meters.

[00:00:48]Under a microscope, you could see the cell membrane. You could see the nucleus. You could see the cytoplasm.

[00:00:55]You could see the big round outside of a mitochondria or the chloroplast.

[00:01:00]The nanometer range is then a thousandth even smaller. So that is the nm, nanometer, which is 10 to the negative nine. And you can see the details of the cell membrane. You could see the proteins. You could see the nuclear pores. You could see the inner mitochondrial matrix. With nanometers, you're looking at an electron microscope and you're seeing the details of the inside of a cell.