Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler Page B

Sandaldjian’s microminiature sculpture of Pope John Paul II
( illustration credit 1.4 )
    According to the wall legends, these were all the work of a single Soviet-Armenian émigré violin instructor, by the improbable name of Hagop Sandaldjian, who’d painstakingly crafted them under a microscope out of motes of dust, specks of lint, and wisps of hair, using tools he’d fashioned himself (mostly exquisitely sharpened needles tipped with abrasive ruby and diamond dusts), and then colored them by applying minute amounts of paint in microscopic suspension with paintbrushes consisting of a single hair. When I asked David about Sandaldjian, he assured me that he must have been “a very calm man.” In fact he claimed to have known him briefly, having first heard of his existence from a visitor to the museum. He explained how he’d thereupon taken to visiting Sandaldjian at his home in the Montebello section of East L.A., but how, no sooner had he contrived a plan for showing the sculptures at the Jurassic than, calling Sandaldjian to tell him so, he received word from his son that the master had died not ten days prior. Of course, they went ahead with the show anyway.
    That show was no longer up but it had been replaced, as it were, by another equally mind-boggling display, this one supposedly documenting recent achievements in microtechnology. “ NANOTECHNOLOGY ,” announced the wall panel, “Machines in the Microscopic Realm”—and an array of microscopes mounted along a long table proceeded to afford visitors glimpses of what indeed appeared to be precisely what their captions alleged: a wobble motor, a microspring, micro-machined intermeshinggears (“gear tooth approx. the size of a red blood cell”), an electrostatic motor, and even a micro wind tunnel. The captions credited these achievements to various inventors with names like “Yu Chong Tai, California Institute of Technology,” and “A. Bruno Frazier, Georgia Institute of Technology”—but, as I say, you could never be sure.

    An instance of nanotechnology: pressure sensors on the head of a pin
( illustration credit 1.5 )
    Or anyway, I couldn’t. So I called the California Institute of Technology and asked the campus operator for Yu Chong Tai, and sure enough, she put me through, and a voice answering to that name proceeded to confirm everything my eyes had seen.“And more’s coming!” it assured me. 4 That conversation in turn made me doubt my earlier doubts about the dubious Sandaldjian. I called information in Montebello, where it turned out such a family did indeed reside. And I ended up speaking with the master’s son, Levon, who explained that there was in fact something of a tradition of such microminiature art back in Armenia (he knew of two or three other such instances), although, as far as he knew, his father had been the world’s only microminiature
sculptor.
“He would wait until late at night,” Levon said, “when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications
between heartbeats
—he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirringsof his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.”
    T HOSE EARLIEST MUSEUMS , the ur-collections back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were sometimes called
Wunderkammern
, wonder-cabinets, and it occurs to me that the Museum of Jurassic Technology truly is their worthy heir in as much as wonder, broadly conceived, is its unifying theme. (“Part of the assigned task,” David once told me, “is to reintegrate people to wonder.”) But it’s a special kind of wonder, and it’s metastable. The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering
at
(the marvels of nature) and wondering
whether
(any