The World's Smallest Writing
Stanford researchers have reclaimed bragging rights for creating the world's
smallest writing, a distinction the university first gained in 1985 and lost
in 1990.
How small is the writing? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic
sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of
a meter.
The researchers encoded the letters "S" and "U" (as in
Stanford University) within the interference patterns formed by quantum electron
waves on the surface of a sliver of copper. The wave patterns even project a
tiny hologram of the data, which can be viewed with a powerful microscope.
Run time: 2.38 mins