The printing of the Gutenberg Bible ushered in the new age of the movable type press in Europe, making the mass production of books possible for the first time. Just imagine what this little thing can do for the future.
Behold-- the Nano Bible.
Designed by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, the Nano Bible is not a typical leather-bound book, but instead it is a gold-coated silicon chip. It measures at 0.04 square millimeters and 0.00002 millimeters (20 nanometers) deep, making it smaller than a pinhead.
The Nano Bible contains all the 39 books in the Hebrew Bible with all 1.2 million letters written on the silicon chip using a focused ion beam generator. The generator was used to shoot gallium ions onto the surface of the silicon chip, causing atoms to erode and create the minute inscriptions.
Professor Uri Sivan, the director of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at Technion, came up with the idea to inscribe the entire text of the Bible, while Dr. Ohad Zohar managed the project of putting it into nano form. The creation of the nano chip itself and the software to be used to place the text on the chip were left to engineers at the Sara and Moshe Zisapel Nanoelectronics Center and the Wolfson Microelectronics Research and Teaching Center.
According to the researchers, the Nano Bible was not created to make the holy book more portable, but it was to raise awareness in the benefits of nanotechnology. They hope that nanotechnology will make it possible for scientists to inscribe data on DNA or other bio-molecules.
"The nano-Bible project was aimed at displaying the miniaturization ability we have," Sivan said.
To help viewers read the text on the Nano Bible, a photograph of the inscription will be expanded 10,000 times, enough to fit a seven-by-seven frame. It will be placed next to the original Nano Bible at the Technion facility.
The Nano Bible is currently on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. The exhibition also features the Aleppo Codex and the Dead Sea Scrolls, two of the oldest copies of the Biblical text, as well as a presentation on how the Nano Bible was created.
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