Reality → Scale
| In 10 steps from smallest to largest: | |
|---|---|
| meters | |
| 10-19 | elementary particle |
| 10-14 | atomic nucleus |
| 10-9 | molecule |
| 10-4 | human egg |
| 101 | whale |
| 106 | medium-size country |
| 1011 | Earth-Sun distance |
| 1016 | Sun-Alpha Centauri distance |
| 1021 | distance to Large Magellanic Cloud |
| 1026 | end of detectable universe |
Each step represents a size range from 1 to 100,000 (5 orders of magnitude), equivalent to the visualization of a pinhead in a stadium. When pondering the vastness of the physical world, we realize that our brains cannot grasp infinitesimal smallness nor infinite expanse. But we also cannot grasp the concept of a finite physical cosmos: there is always the question of what might exist beyond the border [1] .
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Contrary to the postulate of quantum theory that everything is quantized, particle physics and cosmology also lead us to believe that infinitesimals and infinities are part of the physical world. The scanning tunneling microscope shows that the average size (diameter) of an atom is about 0.1 nanometer; electron scattering shows that the nucleus size is about 10,000 times smaller; and theoretical physics deduce that elementary particles, such as the matter-building quarks and electrons are pointlike objects, i.e., have no size at all (although reportedly some accelerator experiments attribute a size to the quark). Moreover, the theoretical Planck length has been used to gauge the size of unimaginably small hypothetical strings presumed to be fundamental to everything, including limitless universes (see also Subatomic world, Note 2).