World's smallest book

To the naked eye, it looks like a fleck of tile decorated with the Greek letters alpha and omega. But when it is magnified by a factor of 600, its true nature becomes evident — the world's most portable copy of the New Testament. According to the latest version of Guinness Book of World Records, the five-millimeter-square tablet is the smallest reproduction yet of a printed book. It was created in 2001 by two scientists in the field of object recognition, Pawan Sinha and Pamela R. Lipson . . .

Tiny writing has been an after-hours project of theirs since they were doctoral candidates at the M.I.T. artificial intelligence laboratory in the mid-1990's. It was then that Mr. Sinha fell asleep during a conference and dreamed he was writing the Bhagavad Gita on a grain of rice. When he awoke, the feat seemed feasible, if he could employ the technology used to etch microchips.

In the next six years, he developed software that allowed him and Ms. Lipson to write in gold on a crystalline silicon chip, using a font with letters each four microns high — about the height of a red blood cell. They chose 24-karat gold because it not only resists oxidation but looks pretty, even under a microscope.

They started modestly, with a reproduction of the Lord's Prayer, before setting to work on the 180,568 words of the King James version of the New Testament. (The Gita, a sacred Hindu text, was too short to be a real challenge.) . . .

For archiving, they say, their small book is resistant to heat, humidity and electromagnetic radiation. And while tiny, it is not digital. "If the PC goes out of vogue, you'll still be able to read this," Ms. Lipson said.

Posted by David on June 9, 2003 1:12 PM