TEDxMaui
Gary Greenberg: The beautiful nano details of our world
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When photographed under a 3D microscope, grains of sand appear like colorful pieces of candy and the stamens in a flower become like fantastical spires at an amusement park. Gary Greenberg reveals the thrilling details of the micro world.
Gary Greenberg - Micro photographer
Gary Greenberg is a photographer, biomedical researcher and inventor intent on giving us all a view of the microscopic wonders all around us. Full bio
Gary Greenberg is a photographer, biomedical researcher and inventor intent on giving us all a view of the microscopic wonders all around us. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world
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from a totally unique point of view,
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and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world.
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I've found, after doing this for many, many years,
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that there's a magical world behind reality.
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And that can be seen directly through a microscope,
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and I'm going to show you some of this today.
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So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small,
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something that we can see with our naked eye,
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and that's a bee. So when you look at this bee,
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it's about this size here, it's about a centimeter.
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But to really see the details of the bee, and really
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appreciate what it is, you have to look a little bit closer.
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So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope,
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and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has
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thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia,
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and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes
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so they know when they're right up close to something,
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because they can't see in stereo.
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As we go smaller, here is a human hair.
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A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see.
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It's about a tenth of a millimeter.
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And as we go smaller again,
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about ten times smaller than that, is a cell.
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So you could fit 10 human cells
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across the diameter of a human hair.
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So when we would look at cells, this is how I really got
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involved in biology and science is by looking
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at living cells in the microscope.
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When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was
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absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like.
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So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system,
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they're actually moving all over the place.
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This cell is looking for foreign objects,
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bacteria, things that it can find.
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And it's looking around, and when it finds something,
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and recognizes it being foreign,
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it will actually engulf it and eat it.
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So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium,
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and it engulfs it and eats it.
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If you take some heart cells from an animal,
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and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat.
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That's their job. Every cell has a mission in life,
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and these cells, the mission is
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to move blood around our body.
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These next cells are nerve cells, and right now,
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as we see and understand what we're looking at,
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our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this
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right now. They're not just static. They're moving around
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making new connections, and that's what happens when we learn.
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As you go farther down this scale here,
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that's a micron, or a micrometer, and we go
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all the way down to here to a nanometer
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and an angstrom. Now, an angstrom is the size
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of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
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That's how small that is.
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And microscopes that we have today can actually see
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individual atoms. So these are some pictures
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of individual atoms. Each bump here is an individual atom.
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This is a ring of cobalt atoms.
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So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here
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is called the nano world, and the nano world,
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the whole micro world that we see,
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there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and
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the whole -- and that is the world of molecules and atoms.
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But I want to talk about this larger world,
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the world of the micro world.
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So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower,
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what would that flower look like, if the flower was this big?
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It wouldn't look or feel like anything that we see
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when we look at a flower. So if you look at this flower here,
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and you're a little bug, if you're on that surface
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of that flower, that's what the terrain would look like.
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The petal of that flower looks like that, so the ant
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is kind of crawling over these objects, and if you look
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a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here,
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this is the style of that flower, and you notice
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that it's got these little -- these are like little jelly-like things
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that are what are called spurs. These are nectar spurs.
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So this little ant that's crawling here, it's like
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it's in a little Willy Wonka land.
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It's like a little Disneyland for them. It's not like what we see.
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These are little bits of individual grain of pollen
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there and there, and here is a --
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what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen,
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when you look in a microscope, it's actually made
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of thousands of little grains of pollen.
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So this, for example, when you see bees flying around
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these little plants, and they're collecting pollen,
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those pollen grains that they're collecting, they pack
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into their legs and they take it back to the hive,
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and that's what makes the beehive,
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the wax in the beehive. And they're also collecting nectar,
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and that's what makes the honey that we eat.
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Here's a close-up picture, or this is actually a regular picture
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of a water hyacinth, and if you had really, really good vision,
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with your naked eye, you'd see it about that well.
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There's the stamen and the pistil. But look what the stamen
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and the pistil look like in a microscope. That's the stamen.
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So that's thousands of little grains of pollen there,
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and there's the pistil there, and these are the little things
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called trichomes. And that's what makes the flower give
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a fragrance, and plants actually communicate
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with one another through their fragrances.
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I want to talk about something really ordinary,
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just ordinary sand.
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I became interested in sand about 10 years ago,
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when I first saw sand from Maui,
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and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui.
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So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
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Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
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But when you look closer at this, look at what's there.
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It's really quite amazing. You have microshells there.
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You have things like coral.
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You have fragments of other shells. You have olivine.
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You have bits of a volcano. There's a little bit
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of a volcano there. You have tube worms.
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An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand.
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And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island,
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a lot of the sand is made of biological material
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because the reefs provide a place where all these
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microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow,
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and when they die, their shells and their teeth
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and their bones break up and they make grains of sand,
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things like coral and so forth.
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So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui.
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This is from Lahaina,
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and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually
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walking along millions of years of biological and geological history.
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We don't realize it, but it's actually a record
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of that entire ecology.
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So here we see, for example, a sponge spicule,
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two bits of coral here,
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that's a sea urchin spine. Really some amazing stuff.
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So when I first looked at this, I was -- I thought,
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gee, this is like a little treasure trove here.
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I couldn't believe it, and I'd go around dissecting
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the little bits out and making photographs of them.
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Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like.
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These are quartz crystals and feldspar,
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so most sand in the world on the mainland
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is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock.
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So mountains are built up, and they erode away by water
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and rain and ice and so forth,
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and they become grains of sand.
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There's some sand that's really much more colorful.
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These are sand from near the Great Lakes,
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and you can see that it's filled with minerals
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like pink garnet and green epidote, all kinds of amazing stuff,
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and if you look at different sands from different places,
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every single beach, every single place you look at sand,
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it's different. Here's from Big Sur, like they're little jewels.
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There are places in Africa where they do the mining
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of jewels, and you go to the sand where the rivers have
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the sand go down to the ocean, and it's like literally looking
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at tiny jewels through the microscope.
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So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different.
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Every single grain is different. There are no two grains
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of sand alike in the world.
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Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere.
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They're like a snapshot in time.
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Now sand is not only on Earth, but sand is
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ubiquitous throughout the universe. In fact, outer space
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is filled with sand, and that sand comes together
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to make our planets and the Moon.
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And you can see those in micrometeorites.
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This is some micrometeorites that the Army gave me,
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and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole.
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And they're quite amazing-looking, and these are the
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tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in --
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the planets and the Moon.
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So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand,
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so they sent me sand from all the different landings
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of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago.
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And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes.
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This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing.
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I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting.
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Now, the way my microscopes work is, normally
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in a microscope you can see very little at one time,
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so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope,
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keep taking pictures, and then I have a computer program
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that puts all those pictures together
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into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like,
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and I do that in 3D. So there, you can see,
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is a left-eye view. There's a right-eye view.
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So sort of left-eye view, right-eye view.
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Now something's interesting here. This looks very different
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than any sand on Earth that I've ever seen, and I've
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seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me. (Laughter)
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Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused
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by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon.
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Now, the Moon has no atmosphere, so micrometeorites
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come in continuously, and the whole surface of the Moon
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is covered with powder now, because for four billion years
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it's been bombarded by micrometeorites,
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and when micrometeorites come in at about
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20 to 60,000 miles an hour, they vaporize on contact.
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And you can see here that that is --
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that's sort of vaporized, and that material is holding this
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little clump of little sand grains together.
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This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing.
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And that's called a ring agglutinate.
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And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that,
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and you'd never find that on Earth.
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Most of the sand on the Moon,
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especially -- and you know when you look at the Moon,
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there's the dark areas and the light areas. The dark areas
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are lava flows. They're basaltic lava flows,
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and that's what this sand looks like, very similar
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to the sand that you would see in Haleakala.
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Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in,
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they vaporize and they make these fountains,
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these microscopic fountains that go up into the --
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I was going to say "up into the air," but there is no air --
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goes sort of up, and these microscopic glass beads
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are formed instantly, and they harden, and by the time
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they fall down back to the surface of the Moon,
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they have these beautiful colored glass spherules.
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And these are actually microscopic;
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you need a microscope to see these.
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Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon,
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and you can see that the entire
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crystal structure is still there.
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This grain of sand is probably about
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three and a half or four billion years old,
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and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand
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on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling,
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air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion
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down here by the Sun, has these solar storms,
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and that's erosion by solar radiation.
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So what I've been trying to tell you today is
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things even as ordinary as a grain of sand
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can be truly extraordinary if you look closely
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and if you look from a different and a new point of view.
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I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said,
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"To see a world in a grain of sand
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and a heaven in a wild flower,
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hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
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and eternity in an hour."
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Thank you. (Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Gary Greenberg - Micro photographerGary Greenberg is a photographer, biomedical researcher and inventor intent on giving us all a view of the microscopic wonders all around us.
Why you should listen
A photographer and filmmaker with a Ph.D. in biomedical research, Gary Greenberg creates new ways to capture the spectacular landscapes that are hidden from everyday perception inside grains of sand, human cells and flower petals. Using high-definition, three-dimensional light microscopes -- for which he holds 18 patents -- Greenberg makes the miracles of nature tangible, exposing their hidden details. Most recently, Greenberg turned his attention to sand grains, photographing samples from around the world for the book, A Grain of Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder. For it, Greenberg even photographed moon sand returned from NASA’s Apollo 11 Mission.
Greenberg has also taught at the University of Southern California and has been a featured artist at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Gary Greenberg | Speaker | TED.com