Small-minded... Korean scientists have used lazers to craft a version of Rodin's The Thinker which is only twice the size of a red blood cell. Photograph: Applied Physics Letters
If you've just missed the Auguste Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy don't despair. Korean scientists are ensuring that his art lives on, albeit invisible to the naked human eye. Up until now I'd thought that Willard Wigan's micro art was impressive. The famed Birmingham artist has carved the Statue of Liberty in the eye of a needle and placed the cast of Peter Pan on a fishhook, and until recently he was probably happy in the knowledge that his rendition of Rodin's The Thinker, small enough to fit on a pin head, was the smallest in the world. Unfortunately, it's safe to say that he's been well and truly outdone.
The latest sculpture of The Thinker is 20 millionths of a metre high, which works out as just about twice the size of a red blood cell. Researchers developed the microscopic version of the piece by scanning a replica of the original and carving the recreation with lasers. What they have created is a version 93,000 times smaller than the six-foot-high original. And why, pray, have they bothered doing this? Surely a sculpture that is too small to see has very little aesthetic value? Well, it's all in the name of developing Nanotechnology .
