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Microbiology · Chapter 2

How Small Is a Microbe?

Everything on this bench is drawn to scale. Slide the zoom to set how wide the field is, from 4 millimeters down to 60 nanometers. Then pick the instrument you are looking through. Each one has a resolution limit, so things smaller than that limit turn into a blur or vanish.

The field

A circular field of view holding objects drawn to scale

The scale of smalldrag the zoom slider

Zoom

4 mmacross the fieldsharp
4 mmwider  ←  zoom in  →  closer60 nm
What are you looking through?

Reading the field. The gold ruler under the circle is a scale bar. Objects too small for the chosen instrument are drawn as soft smudges, which is what a real blurred image looks like.

Pick an objecttap to frame it