Innovations for people and the environment

We take a quartz cube with edges a centimetre long. Everyone of its six sides has a surface of a square centimetre. The surface of the whole cube is 6 cm². Now we divide the block with a fine saw on each side ten times. In this way we get 1,000 small cubes with an edge length of a millimetre. The surface of a mini cube is just 6 square millimetres, but all of the thousand cubes together have a surface of 60 square centimetres. Therefore the cutting has led to a ten fold increase in the size of the surface of the initial quartz block.

With the right equipment and a lot of patience we cut the dice further- the edge length should now be a nanometre. After the work is finished we have a sextillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) nano quartz cubes, which can no longer be seen with the naked eye. The sum of their surfaces is 60 million square centimetres, which is 60 square metres. Suddenly a cubic centimetre of quartz fills around three quarters of a football field.

The experiment of reducing the quartz cube shows an important characteristic of the nano world, the large ratio of surface to volume. Before and after sawing the volume is one cubic centimetre. The surface however is around ten million times larger after being sawed into small cubes with an edge length of 1nm.