I needed a break from blogging about the “family drama” and decided to blog about the nerdy things for which I am known to discuss with friends (yeah you Steve).
Atoms are tiny—very tiny indeed. Half a million of them lined up shoulder to shoulder could hide behind a human hair. On such a scale an individual atom is essentially impossible to imagine, but we can of course try.
Start with a millimeter, which is a line about this long: -. Now imagine that line divided into a thousand equal widths. Each of those widths is a micron. This is the scale of microorganisms. A typical paramecium, for instance, is about two microns wide, 0.002 millimeters, which is really very small. If you wanted to see with your naked eye a paramecium swimming in a drop of water, you would have to enlarge the drop until it was some forty feet across. However, if you wanted to see the atoms in the same drop, you would have to make the drop fifteen miles across.
The preceding was an excerpt from the book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Author Bill Bryson. This is by far my favorite book of all time. I have read it five times, and actually am on my sixth! If you enjoy information, all kinds of information, from Physics to Geology to Cosmology then this book is a MUST READ!
And to Mr. Bryson, please don’t sue me for using quotes from your book. LOL.
A break from the DRAMA BLOGGING... :)
Posted by Jamie A MacDonald at Friday, May 05, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment