okay so i wanted to quickly give a a good concrete example of what it means to run a biology thought experiment and i will do that by showing you what i did this morning as an example so this morning i wanted to solidify my comfy understanding of what the cell looked like in 3d so i took an area of this room so about here to about here and visualized it as a cell and so when you're walking around this area you kind of see the cell around you and um to anchor myself in this environment
i needed to understand what the length of an atom would be because meters are nonsense you know on the cell level um you're looking at a millionth of a meter and it makes no sense at all to use a meter as a reference frame so you should use atoms instead or whatever else suits your fancy and so therefore if this kind of you know area right here is about a cell then a tenth of it would be a thousand atoms so that basically is this um this is a thousand atoms um and so it's kind
of cool because a thousand is an approachable number you kind of look at this and say okay this is around a thousand atoms so this length scale i couldn't really see an atom but i can imagine about how big one would be um and for further reference um this thing right here would be a hundred atoms um and so you kind of look at it and yeah i mean you couldn't see that like you could approximately maybe like smaller than a millimeter but like not that much smaller and it's cool that you could have some
feeling for about how big it would be so uh therefore uh one of the first intuitions that this kind of chain of reasoning gave me was a surprise feeling because if an atom is about a hundredth of this then yes um you know that's very small there's a lot of room for atoms in this environment but it felt off it felt like the complexity of the cell couldn't really fit in this size room and i realized the off feeling came from my confusion because looking around there's a lot of empty space and in my mind
i was like wow how can i still get anything done i mean even if it's like pretty well packed um you know there's you know there's sort of only this much room uh it might not have enough room for components it needs and then i realized oh no the cell is extraordinarily packed um like this whole empty space intuition that we have is totally wrong and if you actually looked in a cell you'd see things like smushed up right next to each other all over the place i think and how interesting that my intuition was
off on that and then also that led me to ask the question of you know how much pacifist active diffusion is there in a cell if things are that packed uh do you have enough room to kind of control where things go um and kind of my brain started asking these questions about with passive diffusion for example what are they constrained oh obviously cells use passive diffusion because they could use attribution for everything or active transport for everything because that'd be way too energy intensive um but then in that case what are the constraints that
pacific has put on the functionality of a cell and what things can't it do um because it's so constrained to just that mechanism it doesn't have energy to you know actively transport everything everywhere and that'd be so hard to um do even if you could and then i thought about chips and how you know at a computer chip you have mostly controlled transport so electrons you know i guess diffuse down a gradient but like they're you're controlling where they go um very deterministically and what a chip would look like if it were designed with like
passive diffusion as its mechanism at different components and how that might even work and then therefore how cell like design has you know somehow evolved to fit that constraint so anyhow um and then a bunch of other questions like you know how much information is going out of the cell and what's the topology all these different like vesicles um but just kind of like that all came from making this physical representation of a cell and then forcing myself to anchor to something that i knew about like adam and then trying to feel what was off
about my intuitions around a cell on those length scales um so yeah biology thought experiments are really fun you should probably do more of them to enrich your life and uh yes biology is cool
