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When UCLA scientists Thomas G. Mason and Carlos J. Hernandez designed and mass-produced billions of fluorescent microscale particles in the shapes of all 26 letters of the alphabet, they thought they had produced significant science.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York says it's also art, and a sample of their work is on display through May 12 as part of MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" (www.moma.org/elasticmind).

Mason, whose wife is an artist, said he is "delighted" to have his work displayed in the exhibition.

"I love the idea of science and art mixing together," said Mason, an associate professor of chemistry and physics who holds UCLA's John McTague Career Development Chair. "When MoMA asked me to participate in the exhibition, I thought that was amazing. Carlos and I are honored."

Their piece is titled "LithoParticle Dispersions: Colloidal Alphabet Soup" (colloidal refers to the letters' tiny size scale). Although the letters look large in the exhibition, they are really too small to be seen with the unaided eye.

"Our letters are one one-hundredth of a point font," said Mason, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. "You may use a 12-point font on your computer -- you can fit many of these letters in a single period. In the exhibition, the letters that we have made so small are shown on a large scale for dramatic effect."

Mason said the "creative aspects of art and science are tremendously similar. In both, a new way of looking at something opens your eyes."

A premise of the exhibition is that designers, whether in science, art or engineering, are creating works that are causing us to stretch our minds and expand our thinking to grapple with issues introduced by new technologies and new materials, Mason said. Nanoscientists, engineers, computer scientists and designers have works on display in the exhibition.

"Design and the Elastic Mind" focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science and social mores -- changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior.

In today's world, everyone needs to understand how science works, Mason believes.

"Having a broad understanding of the scientific method is extremely important, even if you don't remember the complicated equations and formulas presented in a class," he said. "The ultimate test is nature itself, not a man-made consensus formed by a group of people without regard to objective natural reality."

The letters are made of solid polymeric materials dispersed in a liquid solution. Mason and Hernandez, who earned his doctorate in chemistry last June, anticipate their "LithoParticle Dispersions" will have significant technological and scientific uses.

Hernandez and Mason have the ability to choose the font style for the letters. Hernandez designed a customized font for the letters and produced them.

"If we want Times New Roman, we can produce that," said Mason, whose research is at the intersection of chemistry, physics, engineering and biology.

Hernandez and Mason have also produced particles with different geometric shapes, including triangles, crosses, doughnuts and three-dimensional "Janus particles" that have two differently shaped faces.

"We can mass-produce complex parts having different controlled shapes at a scale much smaller than scientists have been able to produce previously," Mason said. "We have a high degree of control over the parts that we make and are on the verge of making functional devices in solution. We may later be able to configure the parts into more complex and useful assemblies."

Because each letter is smaller than many kinds of cells, possible applications include marking individual cells with particular letters. It may be possible, Mason said, to use a molecule to attach a letter to a cell's surface, or perhaps even insert a letter inside a cell, and then read the letter to identify the cell. The research could also lead to the creation of tiny pumps, motors or containers that could have medical and even security applications.

In addition to creating the letters, Mason's research group can pick up letters with "laser tweezers" and reposition and reorient them in a microscale version of the game Scrabble. James N. Wilking, a UCLA doctoral candidate, has spelled out the word 'MIND,' and MoMA has posted a video of entropic forces rescrambling those letters at http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/134/.

Mason's research that led to the creation of the letters, which was published March 29, 2007, in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, was federally funded in part by the National Science Foundation. He also receives research support from UCLA's John McTague Career Development Chair, which provides funding for five years.

As a graduate student at Princeton in the early 1990s, Mason founded a field called thermal microrheology, which is now used by scientists worldwide. Microrheology is a method for examining the viscosity and elasticity of soft materials (including liquids, polymers and emulsions) on a microscopic scale.

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