Floor Plans
Downloadable Floor Plans
Exhibit Walk-through
Too Small to See was designed to take visitors from the macroworld to the nanometer scale one. There are a billion nanometers in a meter, nanometers are used to measure things on the atomic scale.
Since few people can imagine what a billion is, let alone one-billionth, the exhibits takes visitors on a journey in size and scale. They interact with objects and explore them at different magnifications. The core of Too Small to See is the Seeing Courtyard where everything is 100,000,000 times larger, everything is at the atomic scale.
Upon entering the Seeing Courtyard, visitors get the chance to watch and interact with atoms in a variety of different exhibits. The scale is all the same and visitors do not have to extrapolate and draw upon analogies to understand that "all things are made of atoms" and every ball they see is an atom.
Inside the Seeing Courtyard, visitors can build molecules, walk through a silicon crystal, and climb on carbon nanotubes, all to scale. The visitors can also move atoms and create patterns using the tools that scientists use to make nanoscale structures. Or they can sit and listen to stories about nanotechnology provided by our partners at Earth & Sky.
Surrounding the Seeing Courtyard in Too Small to See are a number of exhibits to help the visitor "enter into" the nanometer scale world. From Particle Progression to Zoom and the Magnification Station, the visitor can experience everyday things at progressively smaller scales. Also adjacent to the Seeing Courtyard are the Mine Control theatres where visitors can interact with the nanometer scale world by stretching a molecule of RNA or helping to dissolve a salt crystal.
The experience for the visitor is one that builds familiar objects and concepts and then exposes them to new ideas. The concepts and the applications which also include a view of the people that do nanotechnology is rich and hopefully provides the visitor with a new and promising view of nanotechnology.
