I believe they are roughly to scale. I remember reading how Goodsell does some back of the envelope calculations when planning an illustration. You hear in pop

I believe they are roughly to scale. I remember reading how Goodsell does some back of the envelope calculations when planning an illustration. You hear in pop-science how the human body is ~50-70% water as if that is a lot. Really it’s a rather low level of solvent to run chemistry reactions in. I did some undergraduate research in a biochemistry lab and when we would perform an experiment with a protein we were studying, the proteins and other chemicals would always be very dilute, maybe ~99.9999% water or higher. Cells are very “sludgy” and it’s surprising to me that anything works at all the proteins don’t just immeadietly stick together and precipitate out of solution like egg-whites when cooked. It’s a tricky number to estimate because the orders of magnitude are so stark. Proteins are at very, very low concentrations but each protein is made of hundreds or thousands of atoms. The number of protein molecules is small but the they are almost big enough that their volume is not insignificant. There are other things that are unintuitive about chemical reactions. A lot of chemical reactions are faster than the movement of molecules. A protein maybe able to catalyze a chemical reaction faster than it can diffuse through water so it sits around most of the time waiting to collide with the molecule it will catalyze. Basically like a CPU waiting an eternity for data from a “fast” SSD to show up.