The Limit of Smallness

 

The being switched on the projector. The harsh beam of light exploded out. Darkness vanished. As it watched closely, it noticed motes of dust floating in that beam, moving randomly. The screen lit up and the movie started. There were spots with crazy shaped displays, some spiral, some elongated and innumerable pixels lit up the screen. It saw each arm made of countless clustered sparks, whirling and vanishing, some glowing longer, some disappearing in the blink of an instant. The being watched very closely and became aware of a white spiral spinning in one corner. As it observed even more intently,  it noticed the spiral made up of hundreds and hundreds of clustered spots of light individually spinning around. Some came up and vanished while others stayed for a moment longer. The colours blinked brilliantly for milliseconds before disappearing. 

In its deep vision, it started witnessing one such point of light. A single bright spot orbited around by restless particles tracing their perfect paths. The being leaned closer still, but the image blurred into nothingness and nothing could not be deciphered beyond that. It was too small to see through even with its all powerful vision. 

It must be the limit of smallness. 

…………

In the dim glow of the monitors, the nano-technologist leaned closer to the screen, the soft hum of the cryo-electron microscope filling the silence. He’d been chasing this structure for months, a particle so elusive it almost felt like it didn’t want to be found. Now, as the latest scan came through, layer by layer, he watched the blurred cloud of pixels sharpen into a lattice of exquisite symmetry. The machine, a Cryo-EM running at near atomic resolution, was mapping the frozen specimen electron by electron, preserving its true shape in a way no earlier tool ever could.

He rubbed his eyes, hardly daring to breathe and looked again. There it was, a faint symmetry in the pattern, repeating at scales smaller than a billionth of a meter. The final missing piece of the puzzle he’d been building in his mind for years. The data aligned perfectly; this wasn’t abstract, it was structure. A ripple of realisation ran through him, he was looking at something no human eye had ever seen directly. A new sub-atomic configuration, stable and precise. He let out a quiet laugh, half disbelief, half awe and ran his hand through his already receding hair. “So this is what you look like…” he said to himself as the particles continued their silent tracing, revealing, in real time, one of the smallest wonders known to man. 

 It must be the limit of smallness. 

……..

Deep within that structure, in a space smaller than what could be thought, in that lattice, something stirred. A tiny being, no larger than a vibration, looked up in wonder at the vast arcs of colour above it and a deep hum. Spirals of light filled its sky. It didn’t know what they were, only that they moved in graceful harmony.

It whispered, “I wonder what is out there.”

……….

With tired eyes, the nano-technologist looked out of the clear glass windows at the beauty of the dark night sky. Today, it was especially beautiful with thousands of twinkling stars. He blinked and said “I wonder what is out there”. 

………..

In the meanwhile the solar system continued on what it considered as an eternal path. 

……….

The being shifted its focus and started looking at other patches of light and wondered, “I wonder what is out there.”