Bibi’s Gift to Obama Is 2,000 Years Old
President Obama will be receiving an unusual gift during his trip to Israel.
According to New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, Prime Minister Netanyahu commissioned scientists at Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute to inscribe the US and Israel’s Declarations of Independence side by side on a “golden-coated silicon chip.” The inscriptions measure a grand total of 0.04 square millimeters, and run 20 nanometers, or 0.00002 mm, deep.
Impressed? Well, that’s not all.
The chip was set on a Jerusalem stone dating back to the Second Temple Period (1st century BCE to 1st century CE). It’s nearly 2,000 years old.
The etching was done by “accelerating charged atoms, called ions, and bombarding them at various points on the surface of the chip,” a press release by Technion explained. “When an ion beam hits the chip it creates a tiny recess, in this case 20 nanometers deep.”
The preparation process took about a week, but the actual engraving took less than an hour, the statement added.
The final image etched into the chip is made up of over a million dots.
Top that.
Watch Technion scientists explain exactly how the gift was made:
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO