I was having a conversation with my Dad last night about the size and complexity of things at the microscopic level.

“For example”, I said, grabbing my copy of Jonathan Sarfati’s ‘By Design’ off the bookshelf and opening up to the chapter on motors, “the E.Coli bacteria is only 2µm long and the motor assembly that drives it is only 45nm in diameter. Not only that, but this is a real motor, much like the kind that you’d find in your car – with a stator, rotor, drive shaft, etc.”[1,2]

“I don’t even know how to think of things that are so small,” he replied. “Once you start talking about things that size I just can’t even begin to imagine it?”

And perhaps with people like my Dad in mind, the University of Utah have set up a website that will help people to gain an appreciation for the size of the complex machines that get about in a largely unseen part of the world.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

Just drag the cursor below the image from left to right to zoom in from the size of a coffee bean to a carbon atom [well technically, if you pay attention you'll notice the water molecule is smaller]. Very, very cool!

Notes:

  1. Jonathan Sarfati, By Design, (Creation Ministries International, 2008), p.136
  2. As you drag the cursor from left to right, you’ll see the E.Coli about halfway down the scale, with a bunch of filaments extending from its cell walls. The flagellum rotary motors are embedded in the cell wall of the E. Coli at the other end of those filaments, although the program is not particularly set up to identify them.

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