The Bible is full of miracles.
We can all recall how Noah was able to fit two of every species of animal onto his ark, or how Jesus was able to feed 5,000 men with just five loaves of bread and two fish.
And recently, modern-day scientists achieved a feat that might just be able to be considered a miracle of biblical standards.
According to a July 6 CNN article, these scientists managed to fit all 1.2 million letters of the Old Testament onto a micro-disk that, when viewed with the naked eye, is no bigger than the tip of a ball-point pen.
The Nano Bible, as its makers call it, is the smallest copy of the Bible in existence.
When surveyed, about 62% of Americans reported saying they wished they read the Bible more often — most people, however, are more likely to mistake the Nano Bible for a speck of dirt than be able to read it. The tiny Bible can only be read with the help of an electron microscope, which can enlarge the atomic-sized characters to a more legible size — a magnification about 10,000 times.
The Nano Bible is the work of scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, located in Haifa. They created a layer of silicon less than 100 atoms thick, then plated this silicon in gold. With an ion beam, the scientists painstakingly engraved the 1.2 million characters by blasting away the gold layer and revealing the dark silicon beneath it.
If you’d like to catch a glimpse at the Nano Bible, it can be viewed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is exhibited as part of the museum’s 50th anniversary exhibition. It’s situated right next to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains the same exact text as the Nano Bible, despite being about 2,000 years older — and decidedly more low-tech.
“Our objects begin a million-and-a-half years ago. They come to the present,” said James Snyder, president of the Israel Museum. “They cross that timeline and they go around the globe, and in a way, they represent the entire narrative of material cultural history from a place as important to that history as Jerusalem is.”
