Tiny World

🕳️ Tiny World

How far down does it go?

Start at your own size, about a metre, and zoom down by powers of ten to the smallest things we know of.

Knock on a table and it feels solid.

Your arm feels solid when you knock on it too.

Yet almost none of a table or an arm is solid.

The puzzle

How far down can you zoom?

When you zoom into a mind map, each dot opens into a new map of its own. Matter works a bit like that: each thing you zoom into is made of smaller things. Start at your own size, about a metre, and zoom down through everything you’re made of.

you 1 m the floor · <10⁻¹⁸ m

Guess first: how many times smaller than you are the smallest things we know of? … About a billion billion times smaller, which is a 1 with eighteen zeros after it.

Your turn. Drag the stage, scroll on it, or pull the slider down the right-hand rail to go deeper. The big number on the left shows how small you’ve got. Tap a numbered dot to jump straight to a level.

You’re about one metre tall.100 m

The smallest thing down there is a billion-billion times smaller.< 10−18 m

That’s eighteen zooms, each one making things ten times smaller.

The fall

Take it all the way down

drag · scroll · pinch to fall deeper

You Floor

You

about 1 metre

This is you, at about a metre. Everything below is what you’re made of.

An atom is almost entirely empty.10−10 m

If an atom were a stadium, its heavy centre would be a marble in the middle.10−14 m

Even a proton isn’t a solid ball: it’s made of three quarks.10−15 m

Deeper down, matter isn’t made of tiny balls at all.

Quarks may have no size at all.< 10−18 m

Physicists describe them as ripples in fields that fill all of space.

So solid things are mostly empty space, held in shape by those fields.

The fall, in order

Everything you’ve just zoomed through

There are eight steps, and some are thousands of times smaller than the one before.

    You started out as a solid-looking person.

    Eight steps down, you’ve found nothing solid at all.

    The table, your hand and the chair are all made the same way.

    One more thing

    The chair you’re sitting on is made of atoms, and each one is like an empty stadium with a marble in the middle. Inside that marble there may be no solid things at all, only ripples in fields. Your hand is made the same way: it’s mostly empty space, held in shape by fields.

    Pass it on. If someone knocks on a table and calls it “solid”, you can tell them it’s almost all empty space, and that its smallest parts are ripples in fields that fill all of space.

    Three other rooms explain more of this: what an electron is, why everything is fields, and what’s inside a proton.

    You’ve zoomed down to things a billion billion times smaller than you. Scroll back up to return to your own size.