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Today, I would like to talk about the extraordinary nature of ordinary things.
When I first saw this photograph here, I'd just graduated college
and it totally changed my view of the world that we live on.
And I was a young photographer at that time
and I realized that your point of view really rules everything that we see.
So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view,
and this world that I'm going to talk about is the micro world.
So if you look up here I've got some scale markings.
This is one meter, and each scale here is ten times smaller so that's a millimeter,
which is a thousandth of a meter.
We have a micron. Here is a micron which is a millionth for the meter
and a thousand times smaller than that is nanometer.
So we're going to talk a little bit about this world.
I found after doing this for many many years that
there's a magical world behind reality
and that can be seen directly through a microscope
and I'm going to show you some of this today.
So let's start off looking at something rather -- not so small
something that we can see with our naked eye, and that's a bee.
So when you look at this bee, it's about --
It's about this size here, it's about a centimeter.
But to really see the details of the bee and
really appreciate what it is you have to look a little bit closer.
So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope and now, all of a sudden,
you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia
and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes
so they know when they're right up close to something,
because they can't see in stereo.
As we go smaller, here is a human hair.
A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see.
It's about a tenth of a millimeter,
And as we go smaller again, about ten times smaller than that, is a cell.
So, you could fit ten human cells across the diameter of a human hair.
So, when we look at cells, this is how we really got involved in biology and sciences,
by looking at living cells in the microscope.
When I first saw living cells in a microscope
I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like.
So, if you look at a cell like that from the immune system,
they're actually moving all over the place.
This cell is looking for foreign objects, bacteria,
things that it can find and it's looking around
and when it finds something and recognizes it as being foreign,
it will actually engulf it and eat it, so if you look right there,
it finds that little bacterium and it engulfs it and eats it.
If you take some heart cells from an animal
and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat.
That's their job, every cell has a mission in life.
In these cells, the mission is to move blood around their body.
These next cells are nerve cells
and right now as we see and understand what we are looking at,
our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now, they are not just static.
They're moving around making new connections
and that's what happens when we learn.
So, as you go further down this scale here that's a micron or a micrometer
and we go all the way down here to a nanometer and an angstrom.
Now, an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
That's how small it is.
And microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms,
so these are some pictures of individual atoms.
Each bump here is an individual atom. This is a ring of cobalt atoms.
So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here is called the nano world.
And the nano world, the whole micro world that we see
is a nano world that is wrapped up within that.
And that is the world of molecules and atoms.
But I want to talk about this larger world, the world of the micro world.
So if you're a little tiny bug living in a flower --
What would that flower look like if the flower was this big?
It wouldn't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower.
So, if you look at this flower here and you're a little bug,
if you're on that surface of that flower, that's what the terrain would look like.
The petal of that flower looks like that,
so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects.
And if you look a little bit closer at this stigma
and the stamen here, this is the style of that flower
and you notice that it's got this little jelly-like things that
are called spurs, these are nectar spurs.
So, this little ant that's crawling here, is like, it's in a little Willy Wonka Land.
It's like a little Disney Land for them. It's not like what we see.
These are little bits of individual grains of pollen there and there.
And here what you see is one little yellow dot of pollen, when you look in the microscope
it's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen.
So [these], for example, when you see bees flying around,
these little plants and they're collecting pollen,
those pollen grains that they're collecting,
they pack into their legs and they take them back to the hive
and that's what makes the beehive, the wax in the beehive.
And they're also collecting nectar and that's what makes the honey that we eat.
Here's a close-up picture -- well, this is like a regular picture of a water hyacinth.
And if you have a really really good vision, with your naked eye,
you would see it about that well there's a stamen in the pistil.
But look what that stamen in the pistil looks like in the microscope.
That's the stamen. That's thousands of little grains of pollen there, and there's the pistil there.
And these are the little things called trichomes,
and that's what makes the -- flower give a fragrance
and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances.
I want to talk about something really ordinary. Just ordinary sand.
I became interested in sand about ten years ago when I first saw sand from Maui
and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui.
So sand is a little bit -- it's about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
But when you look closer at this, look at what's there, it's really quite amazing.
You have micro shells there, you have things like coral, you have fragments of other shells,
you have olivine, you have bits of volcano,
there's a little bit of the volcano there, you have two worms.
An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand.
And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island
a lot of the sand is made of biological material
because the reefs provide a place for all these microscopic animals
or macroscopic animals grow and when they die, their shells and their teeth
and their bones break up and they make grains of sand. Things like coral and so forth.
So here's for example a picture of sand from Maui. This is from Lahaina.
And when we're walking along a beach, we're actually walking along
millions of years of biological and geological history.
We don't realize it, but it's actually a record of that entire ecology.
So here we see for example a sponge spicule,
two bits of coral here, that's a sea urchin spine.
Really some amazing stuff.
So when I first looked at this, I thought, "Jesus! It's like a little treasure trove here!"
I couldn't believe it, and I go around dissecting
the little bits out and making photographs of them.
Here's what most of the sand on the world, in our world, looks like.
These are quartz crystals and feldspar.
So most sand on the world, on the mainland,
is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock.
So, mountains are build up and they erode away by water,
and rain, and ice, and so forth, and they become grains of sand.
There's some sand that's really much more colorful.
This is sand near the great lakes.
And you can see that it's filled with minerals like pink garnet
and green epidote and agates and all kinds of amazing stuff.
And if you look at different sands from different places,
every single beach, every single place that you look at sand, it's different.
Here's from Big [unclear], like they're little jewels.
There are places in Africa where they do the mining of jewels and you go to the sand,
where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean
and it's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope.
So every grain of sand is unique, every beach is different. Every single grain is different.
There are no two grains of sand alike in the world.
Every grain of sand is coming from somewhere and going somewhere.
They're like a snapshot in time.
Now, sand is not only on Earth, but sand is ubiquitous throughout the Universe.
In fact, outer space is filled with sand.
And that sand comes together to make our planets and the Moon.
And you can see those in micrometeorites. These are some micrometeorites the army gave me,
and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole.
And they're quite amazing-looking.
And these are the tiny constituents that make up the
world where we live, the planets and the Moon.
So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of moon sand
so they send me sand from all the different landings
of the Apollo mission that happened 40 years ago.
And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes.
This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing,
I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting.
Now, the way my microscopes work is --
Normally on a microscope you can see very little at one time
so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope,
keep taking pictures and then I have a computer program
that puts all those pictures together into one picture
so you can see actually what it looks like.
And I do that in 3D, so there you can see there's a left eye view, there's a right eye view.
So, left eye view, right eye view.
Now, something's interesting here.
This looks very different that any sand on earth that I've ever seen
and I've seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me.
Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon.
Now, the Moon has no atmosphere, so micrometeorites come in continuously.
And, the whole surface of the Moon is covered of powder now because
for four billion years it's been bombarded by micrometeorites
and when micrometeorites come in,
at about 20 to 60 thousand miles an hour, they vaporize on contact
and you can see here that that's sort of vaporized and
that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together.
This is a very small grain of sand this whole thing.
And that is called the ring agglutinate.
And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that
and you'd never find that on Earth.
Most of the sand on the Moon, especially --
you know when you look at the Moon and there are dark areas and there are light areas --
The dark areas are lava flows. They're saltic lava flows.
And that's what this sand looks like.
Very similar to the sand that you would see in Haleakala.
Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in,
they vaporize and they make these fountains,
these microscopic fountains that go up into --
I was going to say "up into the air" but there's no air --
It goes up, and these microscopic glass beads are formed,
instantly, and they're hardened by the time they fall down
back to the surface of the Moon they have
these beautiful colored-glass spheres and these are actually
microscopic, you need a microscope to see this.
And here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon and you can see
that the entire crystal structure is still there.
This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old
and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth
erodes away because of water, and tumbling, air and so forth.
All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here.
The Sun has these solar storms and that's erosion by solar radiation.
So, what I've been trying to tell you today is things even
as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary.
If you look close and if you look from a different and a new point of view.
I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said,
"To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."
Thank you.
(Applause)