Tag Archives: Teeny Ted in Turnip Town

Teeny adventures, Latent Life, and photonic writing—a March 28, 2023 talk at 1 pm PT at the University of British Columbia

Leave a reply

After reading the latest newsletter (received via email on March 20, 2023), featuring Scott Billings’ talk ‘Latest Life’, from the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Belkin Gallery I was reminded of a book produced at the nanoscale back in 2009 (May 21, 2009 posting; scroll down to the final paragraph) and which I wrote about again in 2012 (October 12, 2012 posting) when ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’ was added to the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest book. (‘Teeny Ted’ also has a Wikipedia entry.)

The March 20, 2023 Belkin Gallery (also known as the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery) newsletter is promoting the next Ars Scientia events (the information can also be found on this webpage),

We hope you’ll join us this spring for talks and presentations related
to our ongoing research projects in art and science, and the
Anthropocene. Over the past years, we have developed a deep and
abiding interdisciplinary research practice related to these themes,
working with diverse disciplines that are fortified through oppositions,
collaborations and the celebration of new perspectives. We have shared
our different fields of experience, expertise and resources to catalyze
meaningful responses to research, pedagogy, communication and outreach,
and in doing so build responses that are more than the sum of their
parts. This methodology of bringing the unique perspectives and
practices of artists and curators to academic units presents an
opportunity to foster new modes of knowledge exchange. In this spirit,
we hope you’ll join us in thinking through these critical areas of
inquiry.

Ars Scientia

Building on exhibitions like The Beautiful Brain and Drift, the Ars Scientia research project connects artists with physicists to explore the intersections between the disciplines of art and science. A collaboration between the Belkin, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Blusson Quantum Matter Institute [QMI], [emphases mine] this spring’s artists’ residencies culminate in a series of talks by JG Mair, Scott Billings and Timothy Taylor, followed by a symposium in May with keynote speaker Kavita Philip.

Tuesday, March 28 [2023] at 1 pm [PT]

Artist Talk with Scott Billings

Tuesday, April 4 [2023] at 2 pm [PT]

Artist Talk with Timothy Taylor

Monday, May 15 [2023]

Symposium with keynote by Kavita Philip

…

I have more details (logistics in particular) about the Scott Billings talk, from the QMI Ars Scientia Artist Talks 2023: Latent Life by Scott Billings events page,

Please join Scott Billings for Latent Life, a presentation based on his recent research in the Ars Scientia residency. Drawing from a 1933 lecture in which Neils Bohr asserts that the impossibility of using a physical explanation for the phenomenon of life is analogous to the insufficiency of using a mechanical analysis to understand phenomena of the atom, Billings will discuss his seemingly conflicting dual practice as both visual artist and mechanical engineer. Reflecting upon a preoccupation with the animality of cinematic machine, among (many) other things, Billings will relay his recent direct experience with photonic writing [emphasis mine] at QMI’s NanoFab Lab and the wonderful new conundrum of making and exhibiting micro-sculptures that are far too small to see with the naked eye.

…

Date & time: March 28 [2023], 1:00-2:00pm [PT]

Location: 311, Brimacombe Building (2355 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4)

For more information on this event, please click here.

Photonic writing and sculpture? I’m guessing the word ‘writing’ in this context doesn’t mean what it usually means. Still, it did bring back memories of the world’s smallest book. I always did wonder about the point of producing book that couldn’t be read without expensive equipment. And now, there’s sculpture that can’t be seen.

I hope Billings’s talk will shed some light on this phenomenon of artists and writers creating objects than cannot be seen with the naked eye. Scientists do this sort of thing for fun but the motivation for writers and artists seems to be about proving something and not at all about play.

Nanoscale book ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’ in* Guinness World Records

Leave a reply

Professor Karen Kavanagh (Simon Fraser University [SFU] in Vancouver, Canada) and Robert Chaplin, a self-styled artist and publisher, have announced that their nanoscale book title  ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’ has just been declared the world’s smallest book by Guinness World Records. From the SFU Oct. 9, 2012 news release,

Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is officially the world’s tiniest reproduction of a printed book. Produced in Simon Fraser University’s Nano Imaging lab and measuring a mere 0.07 X0.10 millimeters, the 30-micro-tablet book has been added to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The book’s publisher, Robert Chaplin, created the nano book in 2007, after being trained to use a focused gallium ion beam (FIB) by the SFU lab’s managers Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh.

Chaplin designed and carved each page of the book into a polished piece of single crystalline silicon by sending the FIB system instructions about where to mill. The FIB has a gallium beam with a diameter of little more than seven nanometers, so each letter consisted of lines with 40 nm widths.

“Each letter takes a few seconds, so a whole book adds up in time to something probably not useful yet for commercial production,” says Kavanagh. “We need more beams moving in parallel – which is not impossible. Once scribed into silicon the book will last for a million years or more.”

Reading Teeny Ted from Turnip Town requires the use of a scanning electron microscope.

The book is a tinier read than the two smallest books formerly cited by Guinness: the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 X 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Chekhov’s Chameleon (0.9 X 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002). The head of a pin is about 2 mm.

A framed copy of the certificate from the Guinness folks hangs on the lab’s wall while the book, valued at around $15,000, is kept in a tiny box in a bank vault.

Kavanagh goes on to discuss the five-year wait to hear about their Guinness World Records application and Chaplin notes his future plans for ‘Teeny Ted’.

“Guinness has many requests and they take some time to weed out the good ones,” says Kavanagh of the near five-year wait. While there were plans to sell copies, only the one book was made.

Chaplin now has plans to make hardcopy versions of the nano book – a fable written by his brother about Teeny Ted’s victory in the turnip contest at the annual county fair – and is currently seeking investors via kickstarter.ca.

I have previously menti0ned ‘Teeny Ted’ both in a May 21, 2009 posting (scroll down to the final paragraph and then 1/2 way down the paragraph) and in my Nanotech Mysteries wiki here on the Scientists get literary page.

*’is’ changed to ‘in’ on March 20, 2023

The Canadian federal government invests $3.5M in Alberta nanotechnology sector

2 Replies

Rona Ambrose, the  (Canada) Minister of Labour, announced $3.5M for Alberta’s Centre for Advanced Microsystems and Nanotechnology Products (ACAMP) yesterday, May 20, 2009. She made the announcement on behalf of Lynne Yelich, Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification (WD). (Under the liberals, the WD portfolio was held by Stephen Owens.)

Under the project, ACAMP will acquire the first low temperature ceramic packaging equipment in Canada that is able to support sensing and monitoring systems in oil and gas, bio-medical, environmental, agricultural and forestry applications. Equipment such as this will allow ACAMP to promote technology commercialization in promising areas within micro and nano technology and assist companies in getting products to markets.

There’s more about the nanotechnology commercialization that’s to take place in Alberta here.

The issue of commercializing scientific discoveries is a hot topic and I will be writing more about this soon.

Meanwhile and following on yesterday’s post, I’ve found a couple of ananlogies to describe the same thing. Here’s the title of the article, ‘DNA sculpture and origami – a meeting of art and nanotechnology‘. It’s an interesting article which has a good description of the process and can be found here on,’Not Exactly Rocket Science; science for everyone‘. The process the author is decribing reminds me of a project at Simon Fraser University (Canada), where sculptor and publisher, Robert Chaplin, created the smallest book in the world (at the time) with a focused gallion ion beam. The book is called ‘Teeny Ted in Turnip Town‘ and was produced in a laboratory run by scientist Karen Kavanagh. They were working with silicon tablets and not DNA still, there are similarities as both projects require that material be cut away in order create (or reveal as sculptors like to think) another structure. There’s more here about Teeny Ted.