A gigantic, itty bitty project
Research engineer builds tiniest gingerbread house,
Supposedly, back in the Middle Ages, theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas would speculate about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
If only they’d had an electron microscope, ideally one with an ion beam, they might have refined their inquiry.
I mean, the head of a pin? To Travis Casagrande, that’s like a football field. Try the head of a microscopic winking snowman.
Travis has famously managed to “build” a Christmas gingerbread house and stack it on top of said winking snowman, like a little hat, with the whole magnificent architecture contained in a space no bigger than one tenth the diameter of a human hair.
The house is so small that if it were part of a subdivision, the whole city would be the size of snowflake. Or something like that. Listen, it’s really, really small, almost certainly the smallest house that exists in the world today or has ever existed.
Oh, and this gingerbread house? There’s a Christmas wreath over the door and detailed brickwork. On the peaked roof it says McMaster University on one side, CCEM (Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy) on the other.
“It took two very, very long days to complete,” says Travis, a research associate at the CCEM at McMaster University.
The “how” is the amazing part. Travis, using skills built up over years of working with the electron microscope at McMaster, wielded a micromanipulator needle over the raw material that he would at length shape into the gingerbread house, focusing the ion beam and etching into and cutting away at the material through ablation.
In his job he controls the microscopic needle, which he sees enlarged on his computer screen, with a PlayStation console and other specially adapted dials, knobs and keys on his computer keyboard.
Some other details, like the McMaster University logo, are scanned onto the surface using software, says Travis, 36. So that is the “how.” But almost everyone, says Travis, seems equally interested in the “why.”
I mean, are there microscopic gingerbread angels who, tired of spending the Middle Ages crowded on to the heads of pins, would like to move into microscopic gingerbread houses, on the heads of snowmen?
Well, we’ll leave that to the latter day Aquinas-es to mull over, but Travis’s reasons are more forthright and, might we say, noble.
“Aside from being fun, this (the gingerbread house effort and others like it) reminds us of our expertise and just what electron microscopy is capable of, and the importance of it. And the other side of it is to spark public curiosity and awareness about science, which will lead to science literacy.”
On that count, the gingerbread house has succeeded wildly. When I said before that Travis “famously” built the house, I was referring to the exposure it is getting. He and the house have been featured in stories by CNN, The Globe and Mail, CBC and other media in North America, the United Kingdom and farther afield.
The CCEM is a national facility with a suite of 10 electron microscopes and other equipment used not only for making Christmas novelties but chiefly for important materials science research, allowing scientists to capture images down to the level of a single atom.
Finally, as I confirm the spelling of Travis’s last name, he asks if I know what it means. It’s Italian, for — in a beautiful irony — “big house.” Small wonder. Yes, and a big, big hit.