My Kingdom for a Microscope

By popsci Posted 04.12.2006 at 2:27 pm 1 Comment

If this guy were tiny, would he be less ridiculous-looking?

In honor of Make-It-Tinier Week at PopSci.com (see “Flies Staying Fly with Microengineering”), I wanted to point out the timely awesomeness of a recent piece of New Yorker fiction. In his short story “In the Reign of Harad IV,” author Steven Millhauser gives us a fairytale take on nanotech through the eyes of a courtesan who crafts miniature versions of his king’s castle and gardens. The maker of miniatures grows obsessed with creating ever-smaller versions of the kingdom until they’re not only invisible to the naked eye, but no longer visible with the help of any magnifying instruments either. In short, his quest to make molecule-size replicas of the royal ostriches drives him to madness, and he ends up tinkering with air. Let that be a lesson to all you wacky engineers out there. —Megan Miller

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popsci

04/16/06 at 1:02 pm

There is a real potential for abuse here, however the life saving proceedures that will be available from this new technology cannot be ignored.

You know there WILL be some folks that will say,
"Why diet when you can laser it all away?". And there will be some unscrupulous tecnicians who will do procedures just for the money. But is the life saving potential of it worth the risk??