What is it about the word “nano” that is so hot? Derived from the Greek word meaning “dwarf,” it seems it can serve as a prefix to any English word, from nanoapple to nanozoo, to garner customers, government funding, and investors. Throw it next to “iPod” and you have a fast selling electronic device. Or next to “car” and you have the latest little vehicle, “The Nano,” uncovered this month at a car show in New Delhi, selling for the tiny price of $2,500. The cosmetic industry has caught the fever too, tossing around the pithy “nano” word like gold and charging as dearly for it.

What “dot.com” was to the ‘90s, “nano” is to ‘00s. Its promise is as big or bigger. Yet, for all the hype, it is really hard for the human brain to grasp the nanoscale on an intuitive level, unless your brain gloms onto mathematics and physics. If not, that’s where Ivan Schuller comes in. He’s poised to do for the infinitesimal universe what the late Carl Sagan did for the cosmos.

This month’s special Winter Pinhead Town Talk brings Dr. Ivan K. Schuller, Physicist, Actor, Producer, Playwright, and University of California Professor to our community to present, “When Things Get Small: The Magical World of Nanoscience.” Held on Tuesday February 5th, 6:00 – 7:15 pm at the Conference Center in Mountain Village. Admission is free and there will be a cash bar, thanks to support from TMVOA and the Telluride Science Research Center.

Like Sagan, Schuller has the scientific accolades and credentials to loosen up and play. He admits that beating in his theater productions, movies, and teachings is the drumbeat of “science,” but he sneaks it in. The audience is too busy being amused and fascinated to notice.

In 2005, Schulller co-produced a short film with University of California San Diego-TV producer Rich Wargo called, “When Things Get Small.” It’s a whacky comedic film that won five regional Emmy Awards. The film, which seeks to communicate some basic information about research in nanoscience, opens by giving people a sense of how small (and curiously how huge) the nanoscale is. It is useful for the average Joe to glean some understanding of the nanoscale because this burgeoning field of nanoscience is all about building things up from single atoms into complex, engineered structures that we can do things with, like filter arsenic out of contaminated drinking water, effectively clean up toxic oil spills, diagnose diseases at the earliest stages, without a lot of production waste.

Schuller can make things so small that the size is hard to comprehend. A nanometer is one-billionth the length of a meter. Metrics are hard enough for many Americans to grasp since we’re still under the British rule of yards and inches. Regardless, anything one-billionth of something else is tough to visualize so the film suggests we think about a strand of human hair. How thick is it? About 80,000 nanometers. Wow, a single nanometer is 1/80,000 thinner than the average strand of hair. Got that? So now, let’s try to calculate the volume of the atoms of a short strand of hair. To do so, the film suggests that if we scale up the size of an atom to the size of a peanut, we can get a better sense of the volume of atoms in human- sized terms. The volume of atoms in a short single strand of human hair would fill Petco Baseball Stadium in San Diego like a bowl of peanuts. But don’t stop there, the volume of atoms in a short strand of hair would also fill every other sports arena, field house, and hockey ring on our entire planet – a thousand times over. . . No way!

“My co-producer said to me many times, ‘Are you sure of this calculation?’” said Schuller. “I told him, yes, I am sure, but he wanted me to check and recheck the calculation.” Even more astounding is that Schuller, and other scientists like him, can build things using as few as 1,000 of these “peanuts” from these tens of thousands of stadium-sized peanut bowls. Schuller is currently attempting to build the world’s smallest magnets that contain only 1,000-10,000 of these “peanuts,” or single atoms, about 10-15 nanometers across.

The scale of the universe Sagan contemplated is almost impossibly vast to comprehend, and the scale of nanoworld Schuller delves into seems equally impossible to intuit. “But there is a big difference,” Schuller notes. “This is real. I can make it. I can manipulate it. I can comprehend it. The universe? You can only talk about it. It is interesting, but you can’t do much with it. The stars are very far away, and I can’t get there. String theory, general relativity? I can use a screwdriver and do something. The nanoscale is infinitely more exciting. It is not just a mental exercise. I can check the accuracy of my mental exercise. I can experiment to see if it is true.”

Come find out why nanoeverything is so hot, on Tuesday, February 5th, 6:00 – 7:15 pm at the Conference Center for the free lecture, demonstration, and conversation, “When Things Get Small: The Magical World of Nanoscience,” by Dr. Ivan Schuller. Call Nana Naisbitt 970-708-0004 for more information.