A Sense of Scale

A Visual Comparison of Various Distances

Thanks to Tim Talbert for providing some of the data.

Much better version here.

Also see a similar page on Wikipedia.

(The classical electron diameter is bigger than the proton diameter because the proton's size was measured in the nucleus, where it is trapped in a very deep, narrow potential well. The electron is in a comparatively wide, shallow well, so it takes up much more space. Talking about the sizes of subatomic particles is fairly meaningless anyway; in one sense, electrons and protons are point particles, with no size. And in quantum mechanics, we can only talk about the probability of finding a particle at a particular point, and cannot specify (or define) the exact position and size of a particle. The "classical electron radius" tells us little about the actual physical size of the electron. In short, I'm oversimplifying things.)





14 fm 1.4x10-14 m diameter of the nucleus of a gold atom 1,000 fm 1x10-12 m one picometer 1 pm 1x10-12 m wavelength of gamma rays



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