Hacker News Reader

Comment by baobrien | Hacker News Reader

I think articles like Ken Shirriff's "Cells are very fast and crowded places"[1] are good companions for visualizations like this. It helps to keep in mind that the things moving around in cells are flying around at break-neck speeds if you scale them up linearly.

1 - http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowde...

View on HN

Where "flying around" means "constantly bumping into everything else". This means small stuff doesn't just fly around the cell, it has to diffuse through it. A nice side effect is that eventually, everything gets into contact with everything else. That, as I understand, is how small molecules get to their right place.

Also, this means that it's too tight for large stuff to move around at all. Hence the specialized machinery within the cell that transports large molecules.

Source for both: I'm 1/3d of th way through The Machinery of Life[0]. Incidentally, I learned about this book from HN. It's absolutely amazing. The biggest selling point are the drawings - David S. Goodsell created a lot of illustrations (like these[1]) that give you a good perspective on how stuff is packed within cells.

EDIT: that blog post you linked covers the diffusion aspect well, I second the recommendation to read it.

[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6601267-the-machinery-of...

[1] - http://mgl.scripps.edu/people/goodsell/illustration/public

Yeah, thinking about incidental chemistry occurring due to many collisions at or near the speed of sound while packed into a fluid solution or compressed gas, definitely puts things in perspective, in terms of how specifically matched and optimized everything needs to be, in order to be fortuitous as an otherwise unplanned event.

It's like stumbling into elevator after elevator, while running the hundred yard dash at top speed, everywhere you go, only to encounter the perfect dance partner to fall in love with at first sight.

This is a really great share! Truly mindblowing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com