This will be a long talk about the sizes of things, and maybe explain why a lowly silver atom will not injure a human body cell.
Every so often someone will compare the human brain with the computer.
Trying to convince us of how great the brain is. Well, its just not so.
The brain and the computer really do work the same way. They both have
electricity flowing, switching actions occurring, and built in logic wiring.
The brain is biological and the computer is metallurgical. The big difference
is in the magnitude (size) of the components comprising them and the number
of component parts comprising them.
It is true that the human brain is a marvel of compactness compared
to the computer. Why ? Well its the matter of size of the parts, the brain
parts can not be seen with the human eye, the cerebral cortex alone may
have as many as 10,000,000,000 nerve cells. Thats 10 billion nerve cells
just in the cerebral cortex, not counting the rest of the brain or the
brain stem. Even our best computers only have a few million cells (electric
switches) in them, a drop in the bath tub compared to the brain. To be
more accurate, I should say 10 billion neurons and 90 billion glial cells
(90,000,000,000) which have supporting roles for the neurons.
The marvel then is not so much the brain as it is the cell. Not
only is the cell considerably smaller than any man made unit, but it is
far more flexible. It not only acts as a switch or amplifier, it is a complete
chemical factory producing its own energy, building its internal parts,
constantly repairing itself, and sending its output to other cells. Consider
a very large factory, and you are on a high balcony looking out over five
or six thousand machines and more thousands of men hurrying from place
to place caring for and feeding the machines. As far as you can see are
machines and men scurrying around. Thats what is happening in a typical
cell, just one cell, and your body has trillions of these cells.
Furthermore, cells need not aggregate in fearfully large numbers
in order to make up an organism. The average man may contain fifty trillion
cells (50,000,000,000,000) and the largest whale may contain as many as
a hundred quadrillion (100,000,000,000,000,000) cells, but these
are exceptional. The smallest shrew contains only seven billion (7,000,000,000)
cells and small invertebrates (insects) even less. The smallest invertebrates
are made up of only a hundred cells or so, and yet fulfill all the functions
of a living organism.
As a matter of fact, (bet your ahead of me here), there are living
organisms that possess all the basic abilities of life and are composed
of but a single cell.
If we are going to concern ourselves with compactness, then,
lets consider the cell and ask ourselves the questions: How compact can
a living structure be ? How small can an organism be and still have the
capacity for life ?
To begin with, lets ask ourselves how large is a cell ?
There is no answer for that, there are cells and cells, and some
are larger than others. Almost all are microscopic in size, but a few are
so large as to be clearly, and even unavoidably, visible to the unaided
eye. Just to push it to the extreme, it is possible for a cell to be larger
than your head.
The giants of the cellular world are the various egg cells produced
by animals. The human egg cell (or ovum) is the largest cell produced by
the human body (either sex), and is just visible to the naked eye. It is
about the size of a pin head.
In order to make the size quantitative and compare the human
ovum in a reasonable fashion with other cells both larger and smaller,
lets pick out a convenient measuring unit. The inch or even the millimeter
(approximately 1/25.4 of an inch) is too large a unit for any cell except
certain egg cells. Instead, I'm going to use the micron (micrometer), which
is a thousandth of a millimeter or 1/25,400 of a inch. I will try to use
old and new terms for the convenience of old and new people. For volume,
we will use a cubic micron, which is the volume of a cube one micron long
on each side. This is a very tiny unit of volume, as you will understand
when I say that a cubic inch (small child's block) contains over 16,000,000,000,000,
sixteen trillion, cubic microns. Yes, we can not see them.
There are a third as many cubic microns in a cubic inch, then,
as there are cells in a human body. That alone should tell us we have a
unit of the right magnitude to handle cellular volumes.
Back to the egg cells then. The human ovum is a little sphere
approximately 140 microns in diameter and therefore 70 microns in radius.
Cubing 70 and multiplying the result by 4.18, we find that the human ovum
has a volume of a little over 1,400,000 cubic microns, thats one million
four hundred thousand. ( I will spare you the details of arithmetic manipulation).
But the human ovum is by no means large for an egg cell, birds
in particular do much better, look at your chicken egg. Bird eggs, no matter
how large are one cell to begin with. Just one large cell.
The largest egg ever laid by any bird was that of the extinct
Aepyornis of Madagascar ( the Roc of the Arabian Nights stories). The egg
was nine and one- half inches wide, and thirteen inches long. It had a
volume of two gallons, which is tremendous enough if you want to restrict
yourself to the dullness of reality.
This is even larger than the eggs of the hugh reptiles of the
Mesozoic age, and approaches the maximum size for any egg with a shell
composed of calcium carbonate and without any internal support or bracing.
In other words, its mechanically impossible to make a larger egg without
it collapsing from built in stresses. If the Aepyornis egg is the largest
then it is also the largest single cell of which there is any record.
To return to the here and now, the largest egg (and cell) produced
by a living creature, is that of the ostrich. This is about seven inches
long and four to six inches in diameter. It takes forty minutes to hard
boil an ostrich egg. In comparison a large hen's egg is about one and three-quarter
inches wide and two and a half inches long. The smallest bird egg is the
hummingbird with an egg just half an inch long.
--to be continued--
Bless you, Bob Lee
--
oozing on the muggy shore of the gulf coast
l...@fbtc.net
--
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