Nanoscience, Nanotechnology, and Imagination
At its best and highest level, science requires great imagination and creativity. A wonderful illustration is Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, in which he spoke of “a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. …….the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a staggeringly small scale….”. Now, fifty years later, there is enormous activity in nanoscience and nanotechnology, where materials are created, imaged, and manipulated at atomic and molecular scales – in the length scale of approximately 1 – 100 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter; the radius of a water molecule is roughly 0.15 nm). Remarkable progress has been made in creating materials for consumer goods (such as tires, tennis rackets, dental-bonding/filling materials, wound dressing, glues, super-strong fibers, hydrophobic coatings, etc.); high-conductivity materials such as carbon nanotubes for power generation and power distribution; quantum dots and other materials designed to maximize the collection of solar energy; materials designed to absorb pollutants and toxic waste; miniature electronic devices using single molecules; computer elements for storage and computation (including qubits for quantum cryptography and quantum computation), and many other applications. Research is underway on a range of medical applications, such as high-resolution in vivo imaging techniques, drug delivery, nanoscale scaffolding to help repair and regenerate damaged nerve tissue, targeted cancer therapies, and imaging techniques that can be used during surgery to determine how far a cancer has spread. Our imaginations and our ever-increasing capacity to understand and manipulate nature – particularly the quantum-mechanical effects that dominate at the nanoscale – will surely lead us to discover new roads, as-yet unenvisioned.
Nanotechnology is a rapidly developing field. Information can be obtained from journal publications, but these papers are generally narrowly focused and quite technical. Different topics in nanoscience are often covered in “popular” venues, but they tend to focus on specific areas or applications. A nice, three-topic collection recently appeared in the summer 2009 issue of the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. LXII, No. 4 (pp. 8-18).
Information that is broad and continually updated can be viewed and downloaded from the following National Science Foundation website:
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/index.jsp?prio_area=10
and from the National Nanotechnology Initiative website:
www.nanotech-now.com/
