What I want to do in this video is
explore what happens when we get to
really, really, really small scales.
Before we even think about it,
I want to familiarize ourselves
with the units here.
So, we're all familiar with what a meter looks like
(the average adult male is a little under 2 meters).
If you were to divide a meter into a thousand units,
you would get a millimeter.
I think we probably know what a millimeter is
if you've ever looked at a meter stick
it's the smallest measurement on that meter stick,
so it's already pretty hard to look at.
Now if you were to divide each of those millimeters into a thousand sections,
you'd get a micrometer,
or another way to think about a micrometer
is [that] it's one millionth of a meter,
so this is kind of beyond
what we're capable of really perceiving.
If you were to take each of those micrometers
and divide them into a thousand sections,
you would get a nanometer,
so now we're one billionth of a meter.
[If] you divide that by a thousand,
a picometer, so a picometer is
one thousand billionth of a meter,
or you could say a trillionth of a meter.
You divide one of those by a thousand
and you would get a femtometer,
so these are unimaginably small things.
Now once you're familiar with the units,
let's explore what types of things we can
expect to find at these different scales.
And I'll start over here,
and I've written them on the left as well,
but it's more compelling when you see the pictures.
We'll start over here with the bee
and I've arbitrarily picked something of this scale,
there's many, many, many, [an] almost infinite
number of things I could've picked at this scale.
But the average bee is about 2 centimeters long
(this bee right over here)
it's about, give or take, one hundredth

Scale of the Small

Scale of the Small : From honey bees to cells, virus, and atoms -- understanding the scale of the very small