How Small Is A Proton, Really?

You already know that atoms and the particles inside them are tiny. But they are SO MUCH SMALLER than most people think...
Look at a single strand of your hair. Now imagine that hair is as big across as the entire EARTH is wide. The size of a single cell inside your hair would be like the distance from Paris to Rome. A protein inside that cell would be like 6 soccer fields across. An atom inside that protein would be like one school bus across. The nucleus at the center of that atom would be like the width of a grain of rice. And the protons within that nucleus? They’d be like grains of salt.
So, a proton compared to the WIDTH OF YOUR HAIR is like a grain of salt compared to the ENTIRE EARTH.
And protons are what scientists are send flying around at nearly the speed of light to smash into each other inside particle colliders… like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It’s incredible we can do this. As humans, we only experience a tiny slice of the full scale of reality. But there is so much more!
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