Category

Micro-World

Quarks, atoms, and molecules — the building blocks underneath everything you can see or touch.

Everything smaller than the cell. Quarks and gluons inside the proton; the proton inside the atom; the atom inside the DNA helix; the helix inside the virus; the virus, in turn, dwarfed by a bacterium. Each step down this ladder is roughly a thousand times smaller than the last, so the human-scale intuition that 'small things differ by a bit' breaks completely. The micro-world is where you watch that intuition snap.

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