• Question: What is the smallest particle visible to the human eye?

    Asked by anon-244432 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed, Christine, Alice on 11 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      Good question! If you are talking about fundamental particles, then we can’t see any with the human eye. The smallest a human eye can see is around 0.4 mm, which is around the width of a human hair. Atoms can vary in size, but this is around 100,000 atoms wide.. so we would have to have a lot better eyes to see an individual particle!

    • Photo: Eleanor Jones

      Eleanor Jones answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      As Jordan has already said, if we’re talking about fundamental particles, we can’t see any of them with our own eyes. This is why we’ve had to build machines like the Large Hadron Collider in order to investigate them and use lots of different analysis techniques to understand what is going on.

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