What is Nano?

Introduction

You probably know that ‘nano’ is a word used to describe really small things. But just how small is nano? A nanometer is a unit a measure like a centimeter or meter, but it is one billionth of a meter or 10^-9. It is 1,000,000,000,000 (one billion) times smaller than the world we live in.

It is not easy to imagine the world at the nano scale. If you woke up tomorrow and were transformed to the size of 1 nanometer, the thickness of a sheet of paper would look like 170km (or ~105 miles!) tall to you! Materials act in very different, mind-bending ways at this size. You would be able to see the atoms everything is made of and move them around! You could create and build all kinds of new materials, medicines, and machines. The unique properties of matter at the nanoscale have enabled nature to create amazing phenomena and have allowed humans to advance technology in ways that impact our everyday lives.