Here’s a challenge: envision a trillionth of something. You might
think of one penny compared to 10 billion dollars.
Now you can add one more thing to the list, thanks
to researchers in Zurich: a picometer, or a trillionth of a meter,
is around the smallest distance that humans can resolve with a
microscope. A team from IBM has refined their method to precisely
measure
the structural details of a single molecule. That is 3 picometers
or 0.000000000003 meters. That’s one-hundredth the diameter of an atom.