In 2014, a researcher in Australia used a microscope-mounted ion beam to carve a tiny copy of Stonehenge into a silicon wafer. The whole henge was only about one micrometer across - small enough that 100 of them could line up across a single human hair. He called the project a joke and named it after a famous spoof movie.
The image looked exactly like Stonehenge, just shrunk down a thousand thousand times. Each standing stone was a perfectly upright slab. Cross-stones lay neatly across the tops, just as the real ones do on Salisbury Plain in England. The shadows even fell the right way.
These nano-sized sculptures aren’t just for fun. The same tools are used to carve circuits, sensors and tiny parts for cameras and chips. But every once in a while, scientists use them to make something completely useless and completely delightful, like a fingernail-sized field of ancient stones.
