How Small Is Nano - NNCI

Skip to main content

Main navigation

• About
  • Get Started
  • Becoming a User
  • Coordinating Office
  • NNCI Advisory Board
  • NNCI Annual Conference
  • NNCI Annual Report
  • Testimonials
  • Diversity
• Sites
• Tools
• Experts
• Resources
  • Technical Resources
  • Other Resources
  • NNCI News
  • NNCI Events
• Learn
  • What is Nano?
  • Education and Outreach
  • Nano and Society
  • Innovation Ecosystem

How Small is Nano

How small is “nano”?

Nanotechnology deals with the very smallest components of our world – atoms and molecules. Trying to understand just how small the nanoscale is can be very difficult for people. A nanometer is a unit of measurement for length just as you have with meters and centimeters. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, 0.000000001 or 10-9 meters. The word nano comes from the Greek word for “dwarf.” The term nanoscale is used to refer to objects with dimensions on the order of 1-100 nanometers (nm).

To understand how small a nanometer is, we typically compare the nanoscale to objects that we know how big or small they are. Here are some examples:

• a human hair is about 60,000 – 100,000 nm wide
• a fingernail grows 1 nm per second
• a DNA molecule is ~2.5 nm in width
• a 2 meter person is 6 feet 6 inches tall or 2 billion nanometers

Another way to help in the understanding of the minuteness of a nanometer is to examine objects on a size scale. Follow this link to an interactive scale to examine the size for a variety of objects -http://www2.mcrel.org/NanoLeap/multimedia/Nanosize_me.swf .

Other useful resources to help understand size and scale include:

• Powers of Ten – explores the relative size of things from the microscopic to the cosmic
• Scale of the Universe – explores from the size of the universe down to the atomic world.
• Cells Alive How Big video – explores size of objects based on the powers of ten
• Nanoreisen: Adventures beyond the decimal – take a nano journey to explore the macro, micro, and nano worlds.
• Molecular Expressions™ Secret Worlds: The Universe Within – Explore from the cosmos to the nanoscale
• Amazing Creature with Nanoscale Features – this animation is an introduction to microscopy, scale, and applications of nanoscale properties

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schematicky_atom.png; cs:Image:Schematicky atom.png

X Close