In 2013, IBM released the smallest movie ever made.
Its a simple stop-motion short film but what makes it special is that they controlled the placement of individual atoms
to tell their story.
Everyone knows that atoms are tiny. They're the building blocks of all matter.
But I don't think people fully appreciate how small atoms really are.
You see, you cant just use a regular microscope to look at atoms.
They're literally too small to interact with light, making them invisible.
You have to use a special machine called a Scanning Tunneling Microscope
Which basically maps the electrical charges of atoms to create a model representation.
Like what the researchers at IBM did to make their movie.
Even though it seems like we are looking at individual atoms,
we're really not.
So what does an atom actually look like?
I mean if we were gonna scale one up to the size of a tennis ball it would probably look like this: nothing!
And that's because atoms are mostly empty space.
Let's take a simple atom like hydrogen, for example.
It consists of just an electron and a proton but the electron doesn't simply orbit around the proton
the same way a planet orbits around a star
Instead, there's a field which shows where the electron might be found.
And these fields are what define the size of an atom.
The shape of these fields can get kind of weird when you start adding more electrons,
but for hydrogen it's simply a sphere.
To really drive home just how empty atoms really are,
if we were to instead scale a proton up to this size,
the entire atom would be 8 kilometers wide!
That means this hydrogen atom is the size of downtown Los Angeles,
with the tiny electron somewhere within this sphere.
It might be 4 kilometers that way, or 4 kilometers this way,
up there, down here,
or anywhere in between.
If you thought finding a needle in a haystack was impossible,
try finding an electron in an atom.
But let's go back to when our atom was the size of a tennis ball. And, atoms come in various sizes,
but for this video I'm making the assumption that an atom is one ångström wide, or a tenth of a nanometer.
Our tennis ball is 67 millimeters wide, making our scale
670 million to 1.
A group of atoms like this is called a molecule, and this one in particular's name
is adenine. And, there's nothing special about these individually,
they're fairly simple. But when joined together,
they become something very cool. They become the source code of all life: DNA.
Now, traditional models of DNA
are fairly simple in form. But the problem is by showing them as a literal twisted ladder,
you don't have the context for how small DNA really is.
Because in reality, it's like 20 atoms wide.
It's very, very tiny.
And this chain of molecules would stack millions of times
to form a single strand of DNA stretching thousands of kilometers in length,
way out into space at this scale.
Molecules get progressively more complex as the groupings become larger,
such as with proteins, organelles, and viruses.
But at a certain point they become so complex that they become full on molecule economies,
and we call those cells.
Let's take a look at blood!
A red blood cell is about 7 microns (0.007 mm) across,
making it one of the smallest cells in the human body.
It's important because it acts like a FedEx truck delivering oxygen to the whole body.
But even though our scaled DNA would be about a meter wide,
a red blood cell would be 5 kilometers wide.
They would appear in the sky like alien dropships coming to exterminate humanity.
A single drop of blood contains 5 million red blood cells.
In fact, your body produces 2 million of these every second!
There are trillions of these running through your veins right now!
That is such a crazy fact that I wouldn't be surprised if you took that with a grain of salt, I mean...
what if we did!
Regular table salt is just a compound of sodium and chlorine,
and thanks to the way these atoms are packed together, they form these really cool looking cubic crystals.
Because a typical table salt crystal is about half a millimeter wide, that scales up to over 300 kilometers!
This is several times larger than the asteroid that killed off all the dinosaurs.
An impact of this size would reduce the entire planet to lava,
and this guy would be the destroyer of worlds.
So it's obvious that with our atomic scale, even tiny things become massive.
But when I was crunching the numbers for this video, I discovered something really weird about pennies!
I measured this penny at 19.02 millimeters wide.
When you multiply that by our scale of 670 million,
you end up with a penny 12,743 kilometers wide.
Now why is that special? Well, the Earth's diameter at its equator is:
Somehow, the penny at this atomic scale is the same size as our planet,
with a difference of only a single kilometer.
If we put that into perspective, the thickness of the penny would appear:
And this really helps put into context just how small atoms really are.
Just imagine a giant planet sized disk filled with tennis balls.
But now let's have some fun. Remember when we scaled a proton up to a tennis ball and how big the whole atom got?
How big would a penny be at that scale?
It would be:
That is the size of Jupiter's orbit around the Sun.
That is incredibly huge. But can we go even further?
Just like an atom, a proton is also mostly empty space.
It's actually composed of a bunch of subatomic particles that we call quarks.
According to the standard model, quarks are actual literal points with no physical size at all.
Cause size is kinda irrelevant at the quantum level.
However, there is some evidence that perhaps the quark is about 2000 times smaller than a proton.
So, if you were to scale a quark up to the size of a tennis ball,
how big would our penny be then?
It would become hundreds of times bigger than our entire solar system, coming at just under:
But, now we're on the cosmic scale and suddenly this massive penny becomes tiny again.
I mean our closest neighbouring star Alpha Centauri is about 4 lightyears away.
It would take 14 of these pennies just to reach it.
In comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across.
What do we have to do to put a dent into that scale?
There's a unit of distance that is considered to be the smallest length mathematically possible before the laws of physics fall apart.
It is called the Planck length.
[Plank Guy] Now this is the length of a plank but this is not what a Planck length is.
[Wren] It measures out to:
And I realise that number might not mean much to you but this is a number so unimaginably tiny
that if we were to apply our tennis ball scale, our penny would be bigger than our entire galaxy.
Except, to say that is an understatement would be an understatement!
The entire observable universe is 93 billion lightyears wide,
and our Planck penny would be 90,000 times bigger than that!
Let me show you exactly how big that is.
If we were to confine the entire observable universe into just a single pixel on a 4K TV,
you would need over 800 TVs!
Just to see our entire penny.
That is how small the Planck length is.
Infinity goes both ways.
Our universe is inconceivably large and yet, it is also so inconceivably small.
It really feels like a fractal, with no end in how big or small it can possibly be.
Our only limit is how far we can see.
Thanks for watching.
"But why are you acting like this?"
"Why‽"
"That's why."
[Cameraman] Sam, what are you doing? [Sam] Oh, I'm actually listening to the audiobook of
"Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, by Yourself" at none other than the actual Alamo here in San Antonio, Texas.
It's so often that we hear the phrase "Remember the Alamo", and so with the audiobook of
"Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, by Yourself", you get to create those living memories that you will remeber for a lifetime.
[Clint] There was like a room where they were storing the bodies.
I didn't know what to do, so I just ran and...
I gotta go back in, dude.
[Sam] After finally experiencing the Alamo for myself, I now fully realise
the painstaking detail that author J. Theophrastus Bartholomew put into this very game.
So, if you're interested in history or role-playing games I definetly recommend checking out
the audiobook edition of "Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, by Yourself".
Available on Audible, right now.