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What I want to do in this video is

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explore what happens when we get to

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really, really, really small scales.

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Before we even think about it,

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I want to familiarize ourselves

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with the units here.

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So, we're all familiar with what a meter looks like

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(the average adult male is a little under 2 meters).

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If you were to divide a meter into a thousand units,

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you would get a millimeter.

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I think we probably know what a millimeter is

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if you've ever looked at a meter stick

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it's the smallest measurement on that meter stick,

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so it's already pretty hard to look at.

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Now if you were to divide each of those millimeters into a thousand sections,

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you'd get a micrometer,

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or another way to think about a micrometer

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is [that] it's one millionth of a meter,

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so this is kind of beyond

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what we're capable of really perceiving.

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If you were to take each of those micrometers

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and divide them into a thousand sections,

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you would get a nanometer,

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so now we're one billionth of a meter.

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[If] you divide that by a thousand,

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a picometer, so a picometer is

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one thousand billionth of a meter,

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or you could say a trillionth of a meter.

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You divide one of those by a thousand

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and you would get a femtometer,

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so these are unimaginably small things.

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Now once you're familiar with the units,

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let's explore what types of things we can

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expect to find at these different scales.

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And I'll start over here,

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and I've written them on the left as well,

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but it's more compelling when you see the pictures.

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We'll start over here with the bee

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and I've arbitrarily picked something of this scale,

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there's many, many, many, [an] almost infinite

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number of things I could've picked at this scale.

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But the average bee is about 2 centimeters long

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(this bee right over here)

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it's about, give or take, one hundredth