God does not play dice!

[bernard]

Hi SomaSimplers,

At any rate, I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.

You're lost with the atomic pinballs! :D That's OK, It is not a problem. Nature plays football, too.

Hope you'll understand Its rules? ;)

[bernard]

The Red team: (sodium)

This team is the most important in axon since there is 300/500 Na (sodium) ions channels per µm² (0.000,001 m).
There is thus 17/22 pores on a µm. that's few and lot at the same time.

In nodes of Ranvier (myelinated axons), there is more since we find 3000/4500 sodium channels 55/67 per µm.

[bernard]

The Red player (Na ion) is 0.1 nm = 0.000,000,000,1 m
The Na Channel is 20 nm of diameter.

The gap between each ion channel is thus 50 nm.

If we consider the ball, human scaled (30 cm) thus the ions channels will be arranged every 150 m.

[bernard]

Here is a football field (do we say field in English?)

It is quite the same size as our virtual ioninc one (120 m).

http://www.somasimple.com/images/terrain2.gif

[bernard]

Since there is 20 ions channels per µm then we have a µm that is scaled to 3000 meters. And of course, a complete neuron will be 3,000,000,000 meters long (3 millions kilometers)

Conclusion: ions are very little things and need a strong phenomenon to be moved on such distance.

BTW, I found a more visual view to convince you about ionic motion. ;)