As he told me and recounted in his (excellent) memoirs, The Trembling Mountain, Klitzman spent a year with the Fore (FOR - ay) tribe of Papua New Guinea, who are, along with the inhabitants of the British Isles, still the only two known human populations to have ever been threatened with virtual extinction at the hands
of a submicroscopic particle known as a prion.
It describes, with incredible precision, the bizarre and counterintuitive behavior of the very small: atoms and electrons and other wee beasties
of the submicroscopic world.
More stuff that causes showers The air we breathe can be teeming with billions and billions
of submicroscopic particles less than 1/8, 000 th the width of a human hair.
Their success will lead to unprecedented views
of the submicroscopic realm and to solutions for challenging issues faced in the life sciences, medicine and manufacturing.
In their exploration
of the submicroscopic world of atomic nuclei, physicists are like men groping in a dark cave with a flashlight that goes on for only an instant and each time lights only a tiny corner of the cave.
The world
of submicroscopic physics is so utterly different from the one that we observe in our ordinary experience that words and pictures fail us when we try to imagine what it is like in its inner constituency.
Not exact matches
As the very title
of the essay makes clear, his problematic is how to justify the existence
of compound individual entities (e.g., organisms) when the ultimate entities are microscopic (cells) or
submicroscopic (atoms).
This means that
submicroscopic events are themselves «acts
of decision» by which certain possibilities for behavior are actualized and others are cut out.
Bohr's principle
of complementarity does not tell us that matter at the
submicroscopic level is either particulate or wavelike.
Submicroscopic events are conditioned by the instruments with which we observe them, and perhaps even by one's consciousness
of them.
McDaniel (1983) develops the thesis that quantum mechanics leads to the notion that
submicroscopic events have this degree
of freedom and make decisions.
There is a second option for dealing with the question
of how possibilities at the
submicroscopic level are decided.
«Cosmic evolution suggests that what we know most intimately, our own subjective experiences, are highly developed forms
of what there, was in the beginning,
submicroscopic matter» (McDaniel 1983 p. 306).
Among the Gobstopper's ingredients were
submicroscopic particles
of titanium dioxide, a substance commonly added to plastics, paint, cosmetics and sunscreen.
«Dry ice, falling on the cloud, caused
submicroscopic bits
of ice to appear in the cloud,» Science News reported in January 1947.
Solar wind also affects the surfaces
of Mercury, Moon, and asteroids in the form
of space weathering [13] Because they do not have any substantial atmosphere, solar wind ions hit their surface materials and either alter the atomic structure
of the materials or form a thin coating containing
submicroscopic (or nanophase) metallic iron particles.
Colloidal silver is clusters
of silver atoms which are
submicroscopic in size.
«A
submicroscopic infective particle which is able to multiply within the cells
of a host organism.»