The folks at Physics Central are running a video contest, with the winner getting the world's smallest trophy:
Get your camera out... 'cause the world's smallest trophy is up for grabs! You could win the smallest trophy ever made, and $1000 of (normal sized) cash in the Physics Central Nano Bowl Video Contest To enter the Nano Bowl video contest, make a video that demonstrates some aspect of physics in football. Upload the video to YouTube with the tag *nanobowl.* The deadline is Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, 2008. More info: www.physicscentral.org/nanobowl/ The trophy will be created in silicon and metal, and will l be visible only under super high magnification electron or scanning microscopes. At such minuscule dimensions, the width of the features will be about a thousand times thinner than a strand of human hair! The trophy is being made right now by physicists of the Craighead research group at Cornell University in Ithaca , NY
See their site for more details.
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Comments
# 1 | steph with a capital T. | January 29, 2008 1:43 AM
Pretty fun idea but... uhh.. how are the winners supposed to show off the trophy? (because if they could not, that would defeat the point of the trophy) General accessibility and electron microscopes I have not known to occur in nature... The people who do have access are scientists who 1) would not waste their time on a YouTube video for a trophy they could probably make themselves and 2)any high school student can make a video about the physics of football, and I don't of any high schooler with personal access to electron microscopes.
A very cool idea, definitely, but perhaps more for novelty than much else, as a second thought about that trophy doesn't make much sense.
# 2 | Buzz Skyline | January 29, 2008 11:20 AM
Yep, the trophy is too small to see with anything short of an electron microscope, but the APS is also giving the winner a plaque with a high resolution micrograph to show off the tiny design.
# 3 | physicsbabe | January 29, 2008 1:04 PM
The trophy chip has three layers. http://www.physicscentral.com/nanobowl/trophy.html The first football field is visible with the naked eye. Embedded inside that field is one that is visible with a good optical microscope. And finally, the nanoscale one is only seen with an SEM...but a micrograph is included. And, don't forget about the $1000. This prize is completely up for grabs at this point!
# 4 | Ian | January 29, 2008 1:58 PM
That is far and away the coolest thing I've heard today. Especially since it includes the micrograph. Otherwise, there'd just be a seemingly empty container on someone's mantle that had to be explained every time a visitor noticed it, not to mention the horror of its case breaking and the nano-trophy being irretrievably lost in the next vacuuming.