A question of scale

I work in a nanotechnology center. One of the strange things about this is that sometimes I shake my fist at a paper I'm reading, declaring it useless because it only provides techniques for depositing micron-thick layers of a metal.

"Why is this useless?" my boyfriend asked, quite sensibly.

"Because a micron is gigantic," I said. (There are one million microns in a meter, for those of you not typically doing work on this length scale, which I bet is most of you.)

The best part is that it took me a while to figure out why this was funny. Because it's true! A micron is one hundred times bigger than what I want! It's like going to paint your nails and ending up with layers a few inches thick, or trying to wax the floor and ending up ankle-deep in floor wax. I work on the scale of 1-100 nanometers, by definition--so ten to one thousand times smaller than a micron. A micron is massive.

Well, back to the drawing board, I suppose. (I am, by the way, looking at techniques to do what I mentioned in my last entry, now with less palladium. It... might work.)