I’ve noticed that people who have respectable field-specific intuition (e.g., chemical intuition) are good at estimating or placing into context relevant figures.
For example, let’s say you’re studying your protein and know that it has a weight of 17 kDa (kilodaltons, i.e., 17,000 grams/mol). Is that big or small for a protein? What’s the average weight of a human protein anyway?*
Or, say you’re looking at potential drug compounds. How strong a drug is for some protein is measured in terms of some concentration. Suppose a favorable-looking molecule has a measured concentration of 34 uM (micromolar). What does that mean, compared to other drug systems? Is this a strong or weak drug?
It’ll take a lot of time and work to build that field-specific intuition. Memorizing numbers can help, sure, but then who’s to say which numbers are relevant or important?
While working on a lay audience presentation last week, I stumbled upon this article which caught my eye.
Getting your head around mind-bendingly big and unimaginably small things is really hard – our brains just weren’t built to do it.
Bernie Hobbs takes you on a short journey of scale of the universe from super tiny protons to super big galaxies. We humans fall pretty much in the middle!
P. S. On a related note, there’s a pretty cool web app that got a lot of publicity a few years back: Scale of the Universe.
*Someone estimated it to be 53 kDa.
**To answer the title, you’re about 100,000 times larger than your average cell.