The beautiful nano details of our world Gary Greenberg
so I want to talk a little bit about
seeing the world from a totally unique
point of view in this world i’m going to
talk about is the micro world i 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 suddenly we can see with
our naked eye and that’s a bee so when
you look at this be it’s about this size
here it’s about a centimeter but you
really see the details of the bee and
really appreciate what it is you have to
look a little bit closer so that’s just
the eye of the be with a microscope and
now all of a sudden you can see that the
bee has thousands of individualized
called ommatidia and they actually have
sensory hairs in their eyes so they know
when they’re right up close to something
because they can’t see in stereo as we
go smaller here is a human hair a human
hair is about the smallest thing that
the eye can see 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 can fit 10 human cells
across the diameter of a human hair so
when we look at cells this is how I
really got involved in biology and
science is by looking at living cells in
a microscope when I first saw a living
cells in the microscope I was absolutely
enthralled and amazed at what they look
like so if you look at the cell like
that from the immune system they’re
actually moving all over the place this
cell is looking for foreign objects
bacteria things that it can find and
it’s looking around and want to find
something and recognizes it being
foreign it will actually engulf it and
eat it so if you look right there it
finds that a little bacterium and it
engulfs it and eats it if you take some
heart cells from an animal and put in
the dish they’ll just sit there and beat
that’s their job every cell has a
mission in life and these cells the
mission is to move blood around our body
usenext cells are nerve cells and right
now as we see and understand what we’re
looking at our brains and our nerve
cells are actually doing this right now
they’re not just static they’re moving
around making new connections and that’s
what happens when we learn as you go
farther down this scale here that’s
that’s a micron or a micro a micrometer
and we go all the way down to here to a
nanometer and an angstrom now an
angstrom is the size of the diameter of
a hydrogen atom that’s so small that is
and microscopes that we have today can
actually see individual atoms so these
are some pictures of individual atoms
each bump here is an individual atom
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 Mike reward that we
see is a nano world that is wrapped up
within that in the hole and the and that
is the world of molecules and atoms but
I want to talk about this larger world
the world of the microworld so if you
were a little tiny bug living in a
flower what would that flower look like
if the flower is this big it wouldn’t
look or feel like anything that we see
when we look at a flower so if you look
at this flower here and you’re a little
bug if you’re on that surface of that of
that flower that’s what the terrain
would look like the pedal of that flower
looks like that so the ant is kind of
crawling over these objects and if you
look a little bit closer at this stigma
and the stamen here this is the style of
that flower and you notice that it’s got
these little you like little jelly like
things that are what are called Spurs
these are these are nectar Spurs so this
little ant that’s crawling here it’s
like it’s in a little Willy Wonka land
it’s like a little Disneyland for them
it’s not like what we see these are
little bits of individual grain of
pollen there and there and here is a
what you see is one little yellow dot of
when you look in the microscope it’s
actually made of thousands of little
grains of pollen so this for example
when you see bees flying around these
little plants and they’re collecting
pollen those pollen grains that they’re
collecting they pack into the into their
legs and they take it back to the hive
and that’s what makes the d hive the wax
and the Beehive and they’re also
collecting a nectar and that’s what
makes the honey that we eat here’s a
close-up picture or this is accurate
regular picture of a water hyacinth and
if you have really really good vision
with your naked eye you would see it
about that well there’s this painting in
the pistol but look what the statement
in the pistol looks like in the
microscope that’s the stamen set
thousands of little grains of pollen
there and there’s the pistol there and
these are the little little things
called trichomes and that’s what makes
the the flower give a fragrance and
plants actually communicate with run it
with one another through their
fragrances I want to talk about
something really ordinary just ordinary
sand I became interested in sand about
ten years ago when I first saw a sand
from Maui and in fact this is a little
bit of sand from Maui so Sam is about a
tenth of a millimeter in size each sand
grain is about a tenth of a millimeter
in size but when you look closer at this
look at what’s there it’s really quite
amazing you have Micro shells there you
have things like coral you have
fragments of other shells you have
olivine you have bits of the volcano
there’s a little bit of the volcano
there you have two worms an amazing
array of incredible things exist in sand
and the reason that is is because in a
place like this island a lot of the sand
is made of biological material because
the reefs provide a place where all
these microscopic animals or macroscopic
animals grow and when they die their
shells and their teeth and their bones
break up and they make grains of sand
things like coral and so forth so here’s
for example a picture of sand from from
Maui this is from lahaina and when we’re
walking along the beach we’re actually
walking along millions of years of
biological and geological history we
don’t realize it but it’s actually a
record
that entire ecology so here we see for
example a sponge spicule two bits of
coral here that’s a sea urchin spine
really some amazing stuff so when I
first looked at this I was I thought
cheetahs like a little treasure trove
here I couldn’t believe it might go
around the second the little bits out
and making photographs of them here’s
who knows of the Sam in our world looks
like these are quartz crystals and
feldspar so most say on the world on on
the mainland is made of quartz crystal
and feldspar it’s the erosion of granite
rock so mountains are built up and they
erode away by water and rain and ice and
so forth and the become grains of sand
there’s some stand that’s really much
more colorful loser sand for near the
Great Lakes and you can see that is
filled with minerals like pink garnet
and green epidote all kinds of amazing
stuff and if you look at different sands
from different places every single beach
every single play so you look at Sam
it’s different here’s from Big Sur like
their little jewels there are places in
Africa where they do the mining of
jewels and you go to the sand where the
rivers have the sand go down to the
ocean and it’s like literally looking at
tiny jewels through the microscope so
every grain of sand is unique every
beach is different every single grain is
different there are no two grains of
sand alike in the world every grain of
sand is coming somewhere and going
somewhere it’s there there like a
snapshot in time now sand is not only on
earth but sand is ubiquitous throughout
the universe in fact outer space is
filled with sand and that sand comes
together to make our planets and the
moon and you can see those in micro
meteorites this is some micro meteorites
that the army gave me and they get these
out of the drinking wells in the South
Pole and they’re quite amazing looking
and these are the tiny constituents that
make up the world that we live the
planets and the moon so NASA wanted me
to take some pictures of moon sand so
they sent me sand for all the different
landings of the Apollo mission that
happened 40 years ago and I’ve started
taking pictures with my
three-dimensional microscopes this
the first picture I took it’s kind of
amazing I thought it looked kind of a
little bit like the moon which is sort
of interesting now the way my
microscopes work is normally in a
microscope you can see very little at
one time so what you have to do is you
have to refocus the microscope to keep
taking pictures and then I have a
computer program that puts all those
pictures together into one picture so
you can see actually what it looks like
and I do that actually in 3d so there
you can see the left eye view there’s a
right eye view so sort of left eye view
right eye view now something is
interesting here this looks very
different than any sand on earth that
I’ve ever seen I’ve seen a lot of sand
on earth look at this hole in the middle
that hole was caused by a micrometeorite
hitting the moon now the moon has no
atmosphere so micrometeorites come in
continuously and the whole surface of
the moon is covered with powder now
because for four billion years it’s been
bombarded by micro meteorites and when
microwave meteorites come in at about
twenty to sixty thousand miles an hour
they vaporized on contact and you can
see here that that is that sort of
vaporized and that material is holding
this little clump of little sand grains
together this is a very small grain of
sand this whole thing and that’s called
a ring agglutinate and many of the
grains of sand on the moon looked like
that and you’d never find that on earth
most of the of the sand on earth on the
moon especially and you know when you
look at the moon there’s the dark areas
in the light areas the dark areas are
lava flows there basaltic lava flows and
that’s what this sand looks like very
similar the sand that you look like that
you would see in Haleakala other sands
when these micro meteorites come in they
vaporize and they make these fountains
these microscopic fountains that go up
into the and I was going to happen to
the air but there isn’ta we’re go of
goes up and they and these microscopic
glass beads are formed instantly and
they Harden and by the time they fall
down back to the surface of the Moon
they have these beautiful colored glass
sphere Ewell’s and these are actually
microscopic you need a microscope to see
these and here’s a grain of sand that is
from the moon and you
see that the entire crystal structure is
still there this this grain of sand is
probably about three and a half of four
billion years old and it’s never eroded
away like the way we have salmon earth
erodes away because of water and
tumbling air and so forth all you can
see is a little bit of erosion down here
by the Sun has these solar storms and
those that see Rosen by solar radiation
so what I’ve been trying to tell you
today is things even as ordinary as a
grant of Sam can be truly extraordinary
if you look closely and if you look from
a different and a new point of view I
think that this was best foot I William
Blake when he said to see a world in a
grain of sand and I have them in the
wild flower hold infinity in the palm of
your hand in eternity in an hour thank
you