纳米世界的醉人之处

So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view,and thisworld I'm going to talk about is the micro world.I've found,after doing this for many,many years,that there's a magical world behind reality.And that can be seen directly through a microscope,and I'm going to show you some of this today.So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small,something that we can see with ournaked eye,and that's a bee.So when you look at this bee,it's about this size here,it's about acentimeter.But to really see the details of the bee,and really appreciate what it is,you have tolook a little bit closer.So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope,and now all of a suddenyou can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia,and they actually havesensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they're right up close to something,because theycan't see in stereo.As we go smaller,here is a human hair.A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye cansee.It's about a tenth of a millimeter.And as we go smaller again,about ten times smaller than that,is a cell.So you could fit 10 humancells across the diameter of a human hair.So when we would look at cells,this is how I really got involved in biology and science is bylooking at living cells in the microscope.When I first saw living cells in a microscope,I wasabsolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like.So if you look at the cell like that fromthe immune system,they're actually moving all over the place.This cell is looking for foreignobjects,bacteria,things that it can find.And it's looking around,and when it finds something,andrecognizes it being foreign,it will actually engulf it and eat it.So if you look right there,it findsthat little bacterium,and it engulfs it and eats it.If you take some heart cells from an animal,andput it in a dish,they'll just sit there and beat.That's their job.Every cell has a mission in life,andthese cells,the mission is to move blood around our body.These next cells are nerve cells,andright now,as we see and understand what we're looking at,our brains and our nerve cells areactually doing this right now.They're not just static.They're moving around making newconnections,and that's what happens when we leam.As you go farther down this scale here,that's a micron,or a micrometer,and we go all the waydown to here to a nanometer and an angstrom.Now,an angstrom is the size of the diameter of ahydrogen atom.That's how small that is.And microscopes that we have today can actually seeindividual atoms.So these are some pictures of individual atoms.Each bump here is an individualatom.This is a ring of cobalt atoms.So this whole world,the nano world,this area in here is called the nano world,and the nano world,the whole micro world that we see,there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that,and thewhole--and that is the world of molecules and atomsBut I want to talk about this larger world,the world of t