In Gold Ink on a Chip, the World’s Tiniest Book: “Tiny writing has been an after-hours project of theirs since they were doctoral candidates at the M.I.T. artificial intelligence laboratory in the mid-1990’s. It was then that Mr. Sinha fell asleep during a conference and dreamed he was writing the Bhagavad Gita on a grain of rice. When he awoke, the feat seemed feasible, if he could employ the technology used to etch microchips.

In the next six years, he developed software that allowed him and Ms. Lipson to write in gold on a crystalline silicon chip, using a font with letters each four microns high — about the height of a red blood cell. They chose 24-karat gold because it not only resists oxidation but looks pretty, even under a microscope.

They started modestly, with a reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer, before setting to work on the 180,568 words of the King James version of the New Testament. (The Gita, a sacred Hindu text, was too short to be a real challenge.)”