Units in Materials Science and Engineering
You know what a millimeter looks like (it's one thousandths of
a meter).
Now think about these dimensions:
A micron is 1/1000 of a millimeter.
A nanometer is 1/1000000 (one millionth) of a millimeter!
An Angstrom is one tenth of a namometer or 1/10000000 (one ten millionths of a millimeter!)
Many material scientists are designing materials at a nanometer scale. To visualize
materials in these dimensions, material scientists must rely on sophisticated microscopes.