Nanotechnology

It's all about the science of the extremely small. You've heard of millimeters and perhaps even micrometers. Well, there are roughly 25 millimeters in an inch. But there are 25 thousand micrometers in an inch. The next step after that is the nanometer, which is the size of things that nanotechnology concerns itself with. There are 25 million nanometers in an inch. If we scaled up those 25 million nanometers to span a distance of 4 miles, one nanometer would still be no larger than the period that ends this sentence. It's just insanely small. In contrast, the thicness of a human hair (100,000 nanometers) at that scale would be about 80 feet wide.

Nanotechnology is interesting to us because it permits us to very precisely control what goes into the things that we create. The universe is composed of atoms of a whole host of elements, such as gold, iron, sulphur, oxygen, uranium and so on. Whenever we work with a material, we're manipulating atoms. When bricklayers fit a brick to a course in a wall, they're manipulating atoms at a very coarse level. When chemists create a coating for eyeglasses, they're manipulating atoms at a very fine level. Nanotechnology is about manipulating atoms even more precisely than that.

The reason that nanotechnology has become so prominent recently is because scientists how have the ability to move around individual atoms. It's something that we just couldn't do before. In addition, we can look around at stuff at the atomic scale to see exactly what's going on between atoms. So although chemists could create various compounds by mixing billions of atoms of various elements, they couldn't actually see the atoms involved and understand how they were interacting.

Mind you, there hasn't been a breakthrough moment for nanotechnology. Computer chips back in 1974 had features that were shaped as small as 6000 nanometers. As time has progressed, those features have steadily gotten smaller, and companies are now fooling with computer chips that have features as small as 15 nanometers. Researchers are looking at stuff that is smaller still.

At this point, you might be wondering why anyone would get excited about this size stuff. It's all very wonderful that things can get smaller, but really, what's the big deal? The big deal is that when you start looking at the interactions of objects at the size of a few nanometers, the rules governing interactions seem to be a bit different from what we might have expected.

When we work with clumps of billions and trillions of atoms, such as pencils, baseballs and toothbrushes, we're used to being able to grip those objects, move them around a certain way, burn them, float them, and do all sorts of other things with them. But when something is as small as a few atoms, you're down in the realm of nanotechnology, where the behavior of the objects is just... different.

The exciting thing about nanotechnology becomes exploting those weird behaviors. I won't go into what they are because I honestly wouldn't know where to begin. Suffice it to say that when we design at the scale of the nanometer, we can't think the same way that we do when we're designing at the scale of the meter. We can grab a brick, but we can't necessarily just grab a nanobrick. It might stick to the grabbing hand. Or wobble a lot when we move it, Or react with it to make a "brand" or a "hick" - a hybrid of the two. All the research that the physicists have been doing throught the years are now coming into the limelight as scientists and engineers start to build things at this tiny scale.

The inventions that are created will continue to be things like faster computers and new chemical treatments and such. But as our knowledge of how things work at the scale of the atom continues to increase, we'll be able to make subtle changes to a number of materials to make them tougher, stronger, lighter and so on.

Because we're exploring a new realm, we can make mistakes. That happens whether the technology is large scale, such as with the recent Dell problem with overheating laptop batteries, or the small scale, such as with various drugs and their unpleasant side effects. Working with nanotechnology is going to require the same sorts of care that we apply to biological research with viruses and bacteria, because changes at the scales employed by nanotechnology just can't be seen by the naked eye.

The potential in nanotechnology is vast precisely because it is an exploration of an unknown realm. We don't know what we'll find, and our imaginations can run wild. Will we find a way to treat the surface of our teeth so that they can't develop cavities? Bulletproof vests that cannot be penetrated? Materials light as a feather and stronger than steel? If you search the internet, you can find a steady stream of reports about things that people are learning and stuff that they're creating, all as a result of having stepped into the realm of manipulating materials at the scale of the atom.