Israel researchers at Technion—the Israeli Institute of Technology—put the entire Jewish Bible on a square .5 millimeters—smaller than the head of a pin.
Technion researchers have succeeded in putting a full version of the Hebrew Bible, with vowel points, on 0.5 square millimeters – an area smaller than the size of a pinhead. It’s the world’s smallest Bible. And it was created by those wily Jews.
The nano-Bible was written as part of an educational program developed by the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute. The program aims to increase interest, on the part of youth, in nanoscience and nanotechnology. The idea to write the entire Bible on an area smaller than a pinhead was conceived of by Prof. Uri Sivan, head of the Nanotechnology Institute. The project was managed by physics’ doctoral student Ohad Zohar, the institute’s scientific advisor for educational programs, together with Dr. Alex Lahav, former head of the FIB laboratory in the Wolfson Microelectronics Research and Teaching Center.
The nano-Bible was written using a scientific device called FIB – Focused Ion Beam. With the aid of this device, it was possible to send focused beams of tiny particles (gallium ions) towards a specific object. When the particles hit the object, they cause the atoms of that object to bounce off of it, thus etching it. This is similar to digging a small hole in the earth using a water jet from a hose.
The nano-Bible was written on a silicon surface covered with a thin layer of gold (20 nanometers thick). “When we send the particle beam toward a point on the surface, the gold atoms bounce off of this point, thus exposing the silicon layer underneath. The diameter of the exposed point is about 40 nanometers. When we look at the written example using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), the exposed silicon point looks darker than the gold surrounding it. By sending a particle beam towards various points on the substrate, we can etch any pattern of points, especially one that represents text,†explains Ohad Zohar.
I wonder how many angels could dance on it? Mind you, they wouldn’t, out of respect for what it contains, but hey, if the medieval Catholics can wonder, so can we.
As reader Eric, who sent me this story, says: Now all they need to do is develop a teeny-tiny yad so we can read from it.
Could they make mini-Qurans?
Or just small enough to print all the suras on a roll… a two-ply roll…
This dovetails nicely with various “long time” or “long now” research. The idea is developing techniques for preserving information in a way that will be meaningful thousands of years from now.
It’s a real problem. We can read stone artifacts from 5000 years ago, but it is likely that the contents of a hard drive or CD will be completely unreadable in a few centuries. Even if the data survives, the technology necessary to read it will be long-since-obsolete, and possibly even forgotten.
One approach to long-term data preservation is to etch text at microscopic scales (like this Torah). This lets you store massive amounts of information in a small space, and future researchers won’t need anything more than an optical microscope to read it. Not as self-obvious as stone tablets, but a lot better than magnetic media.
Very interesting.
And I doubt that the information on a CD will even survive that long. I can’t remember which archive it was, but they had converted many of their texts to CD storage.
Several months later they went down to read a few, and found them to have majors errors. They couldn’t figure it out till they looked at the disks under a scope.
Yep. A organism exists that can eat the plastic that CD’s are made of.
I wonder what the Jews will invent next!
Just curious, what was the last invention that Iran gave us? What possibly world changing thing for the better has it created?
Or is it against the Koran to invent anything new that didn’t exist back in day of their prophet?
The last thing Iran gave us? I think you would have to go back to – Daniel!
Robert
The last thing Iran gave us was a pain in the ass with the Embassy seizure in 1979.