Nanotechnology: Looking As We Leap

Abstract

Since 1989, when IBM researchers whimsically demonstrated a scientific breakthrough by constructing a 35-atom depiction of the company’s logo, the ability to manipulate individual atoms has spawned a tidal wave of research and development at the nano (from the Greek word for “dwarf”) scale. Nanomaterials are defined as having at least one dimension of 100 nanometers or less—about the size of your average virus. Nanotechnology—the creation, manipulation, and application of materials at the nanoscale—involves the ability to engineer, control, and exploit the unique chemical, physical, and electrical properties that emerge from the infinitesimally tiny man-made particles. Nanoparticles behave like neither solids, liquids, nor gases, and exist in the topsy-turvy world of quantum physics, which governs those denizens small enough to have escaped the laws of Newtonian physics. This allows them to perform their almost magical feats of conductivity, reactivity, and optical sensitivity, among others. “That’s why nanomaterials are useful and interesting and so hot right now,” says Kristen Kulinowski, executive director for education and policy at the Rice University Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN). “Being in this quantum regime enables new properties to emerge that are not possible or not exhibited by those same chemicals when they’re much smaller or much larger. These include different colors, electronic properties, magnetic properties, mechanical properties—depending on the particle, any or all of these can be altered at the nanoscale. That’s the power of nanotech.” Many observers not normally given to hyperbole are calling nanotechnology “the next Industrial Revolution.” The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the interagency consortium overseeing the federal government’s widespread and well-funded nanotechnology activities, has predicted the field will be worth $1 trillion to the U.S. economy alone by 2015—or sooner. Clearly, nanotechnology is poised to become a major factor in the world’s economy and part of our everyday lives in the near future. The science of the very small is going to be very big, very soon.