As an alternative to those steps of 10x, one can do 1000x steps. Real world, micro-world, nano-world, etc. Easier to remember, but harder to then work in.<p>If I ask you how big a cup is, you're unlikely to handwave a thimble, or a trash bin - you've handled cups, and they're familiar. At 1000x zoom, that red blood cell is sized like a red M&M candy (though they're really barely-tinted clear). Familiar, memorable, finger-nail sized - 10-ish mumble meters. Not millimeters (wouldn't fit in your arm), not nanometers (too small), must be micrometers. A 10 um candy - munch, munch. Table salt is a cardboard box, etc. With 10x steps, an object appears at a variety of sizes, so that familiarity anchor is absent. But a downside of 1000x, is object sizes can be inconvenient. A public bus appears as either actual-bus sized (real world), or grain-of-rice size (meter-world) - neither great for drawing a sketch. So 1000x is nice to remember object sizes and their relationships, but then you'll often need some other scaling.<p>If you're really interested in the topic, I did a page with some videos, but I'm afraid I've let it fall off the web. Internet Archive has it, but the page is <i>very</i> heavy and slow to load (wasn't intended to be public), so please be gentle with them. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221007220513/clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20221007220513/clarifyscience.in...</a>