Book of Mormon: BYU makes smallest Book of Mormon

This week, Brigham Young University engineers released the results of a unique project they embarked on: making the smallest Book of Mormon ever.

Tiny books of scriptures have been in the works for a while. Fox News reported that there is a Bible that is the size of a grain of sugar. Aaron Hawkins, BYU professor, explained, “Lots of people can do this and lots of people have done this with the Bible. But to our knowledge, no one has ever done it for the Book of Mormon. We realized it was up to BYU to put the Book of Mormon into silicon.”

BYU students Carson Zeller and Ethan Belliston contributed to this project.

The process of making the smallest Book of Mormon was time consuming — they had to “(engrave) the 4-inch diameter wafer with all 291,652 words contained in the book,” and “the students gave it a gold-plated coating”

Zeller told the Deseret News, “For the most part, the project wasn’t too difficult, because the process of etching the silicon and depositing the gold are standard processes used in fabricating computer chips or other devices. The most difficult part was probably getting the text of the Book of Mormon into a format so that we could use it just like any other pattern that would be traditionally used in the fabrication process.”

The engraving involved putting 1,497,482 microscopic characters onto the microchip. Belliston told BYU that this microchip will last forever. He said, “Like Moroni himself, we etched into this wafer so it is physically engraved.”

This project is currently on display at BYU in the Clyde Building.