Christopher Columbus when landing in America
Just as in the year of 1492, the New World sometimes is umpteen thousand miles away and you need a boat to get there. And sometimes, or 500 years later, new worlds are so concealed behind inconspicuous things that only sophisticated microscopes are able to make them visible. While Christopher Columbus crossed a geographical frontier, our contemporary natural sciences cross structural frontiers: They inquire as to the structure of things, and they search to explain how something small becomes something big and translate the answers into something technical. Just as Columbus, the present-day "discoverer" regards what he has found as "a world" which is not only new but also strange. To see the natives of an unknown country for the first time, to identify single atoms under the microscope for the first time. In both cases, what has been seen marks a new epoch.
This logo which presumably is the smallest one in the world consists of 35 xenon atoms
This small-scale world and with this, the epoch of the microcosm were the object of an exhibition at the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum from August 30 to October 4, 2002. Organized by "Kompetenzzentrum Ultrapräzise Oberflächenbearbeitung (
CC UPOB e.V.)" The title: "Mikro- und Nanowelten." It presented basic physical research and the translation of the findings from the realm of the dwarfs (nanos, Greek: the dwarf) into technology.
Text: Birgit Ehlbeck, Jens Simon / Bildrecherche: Erika Schow / Webdarstellung: Volker Großmann
© Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, last update: 2011-11-17, WEB-Redaktion
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