Smaller Than Small

An atom is mind-breakingly tiny. If you blew up a grapefruit to the size of the Earth, each atom inside it would be about the size of a blueberry. There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world's oceans.

Despite their incredible smallness, atoms are real, tangible things. We can image individual atoms using scanning tunnelling microscopes. In 1989, IBM scientists spelled out their company logo by positioning 35 individual xenon atoms on a nickel surface.