Word: billionth
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...theoretical physicist since Einstein, gave a talk titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he suggested that it would one day be possible to build machines so tiny they would consist of just a few thousand atoms. (The term nanotechnology comes from nanometer, or a billionth of a meter; a typical virus is about 100 nanometers across...
Nanotechnology is the science of creating molecular-size machines that manipulate matter one atom at a time. The name comes from nanometer--one one-billionth of a meter--which is roughly the size of these tiny devices...
...that's why next year the Oscars won't be able to count me as its 6 billionth viewer, or whatever number they claim is slightly higher than the population of the planet. Because I don't care if my favorite actor doesn't win. It's not as if the guy isn't overloaded with babes and money already. Richard Farnsworth is going to be fine. It just takes him a little longer than most people to get going at the urinal...
...fundamental physics we need for these tasks. The branch of science in which a final theory is likely to have its greatest impact is cosmology. We have pretty good confidence in the ability of the standard model to trace the present expansion of the universe back to about a billionth of a second after its start...
...however, a team led by physicists Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado at Boulder used lasers and evaporation to achieve something known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a supercold gas in which atoms overlap and begin to move in synchrony. "We get to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero," says Wieman...