What do we consist of?
Where are we?
OBSERVATION
Firstly, there was nothing.
Then, there was something.
Firstly, there was nothing, nowhere!
Then, there was something, everywhere!
Firstly, there was no life anywhere.
Then, there was life, everywhere, on earth.
As far as we can tell, we and everything we can see or measure is made up of atoms (yes, there are sub-atomic bits but lets not go there, we don’t need to!)
This page will be restricted to living bits
Many years ago, before the invention of microscopes and telescopes, (from around 1600), mankind could only see, what they could see with their unaided sight.
In 1663 HOOKE observed a cork plant and : Named the Cell.
In 1800’s SCHWANN states that all animals are made from cells
in 1830’s SCHWANN and SCHLEIDEN theorised the internal content of the cell to be Protoplasm, described as Living Jelly.
in 1855 RUDOLF VIRCHOW found that all new cells are made by existing cells.
In 1859 DARWIN published his thoughts about the “Origin of Species”.
In 1860 PASTEUR disproved the idea of spontaneous generation (living things from non-living)
In 1880’s SUTTON and THEODOR identified the chromosome as the hub of heredity
in 1950’s WATSON, CRICK (and ROSALIND FRANKLIN!!!) discovered the DNA molecule.
In the 1970’s nano-machines were discovered.
Now in the 2020’s the cell is known to be unimaginably complex and jam packed with exquisite, complex components linked and controlled by unbelievably complex control systems.
A living cell – highly complex
Nucleus showing DNA
Cellular machines used to copy DNA
A Kinesin pulling a vesicle
along a micro-tubule
ALL mind bogglingly
complicated
Here we are looking at this text and the pictures
Where are we?
To get a feel We must look around us
At a basic level we measure things we can see, with tape measures. We used to measure in feet, now we measure in metres. (easier for big and small numbers)
There are LOTS of VERY BIG numbers and
there are LOTS of VERY SMALL numbers.
Sorry about this but it will help!
Please bear with me.
As we are looking at the creation of everything it would be good to have some handle on sizes. There are very BIG objects and there are very SMALL objects and we need to get some appreciation of their comparative sizes.
We need to use a system that can handle BIG and SMALL numbers without writing out al the zeros in a long line.
The basic short hand way to do this is, for example, to write down the number 1 thousand 1,000 [ which is 10x10x10 ] as 1 x 103 as there are 3 10’s .
1 million which is 1,000,000 [10x10x10x10x10x10] or 1×106 as there are 6 10’s or a crazy number of 1 hundred trillion 100,000,000,000,000 [10×10 x10x10x10 x10x10x10 x10x10x10 x10x10x10]or 1×1014 [which happens to be about the number of cells in a human body!!]. (depending on size!!).
Note:- there are only 8 Billion people on earth! So, there are OVER 12 thousand times as many cells in a human body than people on the earth. WOW
NOW lets go smaller
If something is smaller than 1m, like 0.1 metres, it can be written as, 1 divided by 10 or 1 / 10 or 10-1 The index above the 10 becomes a minus, meaning divided by.
That’s it, glad you are still here.
How Big and how Small are things?
From here on, a metre will be written as m
1m (1×100 m). The height of an average 4 yr old child
6 m (6×100m). Height of a Giraffe.
18 m (18×100m or 1.8×101m) The tallest dinosaur.
118 m (118×100m or 1.18×102m) Tallest living Tree.
828 m (8.28×102m) Tallest building.
8,850 m (8.85×103m) Highest mountain, Mt Everest.
3,500 km, (3,500 x 1000m) (3.5 x 106 m) Diameter of the Moon
13,000 km (1.3 x 107m) Diameter of the Earth
1.4 Million km (1.4×109m) Diameter of the Sun
150 Million km (1.5×1011m) distance from Earth to the Sun
6 Billion km (6×1012 m) distance from sun to Pluto
These are already huge distances, and we haven’t even got started yet!
What about going smaller! (Less than 1)
Going Down
100mm (0.1m) (1×10-1m) Width of average adult Palm breadth.
Some Small Things
12.7mm (0.0127m) (1.27 x 10-2 m) Dwarf Geko
5mm (0.005m) (5×10-3m) Smallest StarFish
0.000008m (8×10-6m) Width of a blood cell
0.000000025m (2.5×10-8m) Diameter of Microtubule (roadway) inside nucleus of cell
0.000000002m (2×10-9m) Diameter of DNA molecule
That is all very interesting
(to me anyway)!!!
The figures above show distances from BIG to SMALL.
Just comparing two things DNA and the SUN.
The Sun (huge), is in the sky and we can see it, on a clear day (not often in Pembroke!)
The DNA (small), we can’t without very special kit.
Us, we all vary in size so take a size, 1.6m or 5ft 3in tall.
We are so much bigger than DNA and so much smaller the the SUN.
DNA [ 2 x 10-9 ] US [1.6 x 100 ] The SUN [ 1.4x 109 ]
DNA ~ 0.000000002m US ~ 1.6m The SUN ~ 1,400,000,000m
Our DNA is as small to us as we are as small to the SUN, so we are half way between them in size. We are in the middle!
Just trying to get an appreciation of what we are made of and how we are absolutely Jam packed with cells and informational shapes that are unimaginably small.
Although the DNA is so, so small in diameter, the length of each piece of DNA is as tall as us! We will look into that later on.
MUCH MORE TO COME
I may need to make an EXTRA page !!
