Small Wonders ©2001 New Times, Inc. Source: sfweekly.com December 8, 1999
Local scientists are shrinking chips and wires to atomic
scale, revolutionizing the electronics industry. But most of the
nanotechnological advances you've read about are outsized hype.
The bearded man tromps in his sandals across the
Berkeley campus of the University of California. He talks about
multiple universes. He ruminates about making itsy-bitsy machines
powered by "motors stolen off the tail end of an E. coli bacteria." He
says that science and technology are going to "fuzz out the line
between the living and the nonliving." He stops dead in his tracks and
proclaims, "My lab is colder than interstellar space!"
Paul L. McEuen, a 36-year-old physics professor who is
also a principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, works in a strange and wonderful realm of science that
focuses on the very, very small and is called "nanotechnology." With
his easygoing way and shoulder-length hair, McEuen seems to fit a
certain laid-back-and-loony Berkeley stereotype. But according to his
colleagues, he is one of the world's top experimental physicists, and
he is prepared to back the crazy-sounding things he says with proof.
If you ask him politely, McEuen will even invite you over to his lab
to see the quantum dot he built. A dot that could revolutionize
computing. A dot the size of an atom.
To get an idea of the size of an atom, think of a living
cell. Most cells are 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Cells are about a micron in diameter, or a millionth of a meter. (A
meter is approximately 39 inches long.) Atoms are a thousand times
smaller in width than a micron. In other words, atoms are a billionth
of a meter in size. Since "nano" means a billionth, things built out
of atoms are measured in "nanometers."
McEuen looks at his atomic dot with a scanning tunneling
microscope. This incredibly precise instrument is as big as a car and
costs about $1 million. It focuses on individual atoms immersed in
liquefied gases at temperatures that are a mere fraction of a degree
above absolute zero. That is, at minus 273 degrees on the Celsius
scale, a temperature, in fact, much colder than the farthest reaches
of interstellar space.
The truth about nanotech is, truly, fantastic. McEuen's
quantum dot could become the basis for atom-scale computing that would
make today's most powerful machines seem as clumsily anachronistic as
abacuses. Nanotubes are assembling themselves, creating the
possibility of composite materials that are light in weight, yet 100
times as strong as steel.
Over the last few years, however, nanotech has become a
buzzword for research into just about anything smaller than a mote of
dust. And much of what the popular press has described as
nanotechnology is, actually, little but the futuristic fantasies of a
Bay Area group whose assertions are often closer to science fiction
than the science of the infinitesimal.
While serious scientists talk about the nano-sized
devices they make, few will do more than generalize about the future
of nanoscience and technology. This has not stopped the mainstream
press from touting the miracles-to-come of nanotechnology. Recently,
Time magazine proclaimed that "within a few decades, nanotechnologists
... will be creating machines that can do just about anything, as long
as it's small." The extraordinarily unlikely nanotech products
envisaged by exaggeration-prone media outlets range from molecular
sensors in flimsy underwear that tell smart washing machines what
water temperature they should use to artificial red blood cells to
evil swarms of planet-devouring molecules.
The public's misconceptions about nanodevelopment stem,
in part, from the media's habitual reliance on the promotions of the
Foresight Institute Inc., a futurist organization based in Palo Alto.
For two decades, the institute, founded by K. Eric Drexler, has
thrived by prophesizing about the tiny-to-come. And the
prognostications of Drexler and his Foresight Institute have taken on
the sheen of authority as one press clipping breeds another. An
article in the San Francisco Chronicle last July, for instance, relied
almost exclusively on the institute for its information, which is long
on imagination and short on facts, according to many reputable
scientists. The lengthy Chronicle article concentrated on
nano-pie-in-the-sky such as color-programmable paint and floorless
elevators; it gave short shrift to real nanotech developments in the
Bay Area, which enjoys a high concentration of working nanoscientists.
Interviews with nearly a dozen Bay Area nanoscientists
paints an altogether different picture than the Chronicle's Foresight
Institute-inspired tableau of molecule-sized robots "grabbing atoms
one by one" and then replicating armies of themselves. Or Business
Week's Aug. 30 issue, which claimed that within 20 years there will be
a "nanobox" that manufactures items such as cell phones from a "toner"
made of "electrically conductive molecules." The Foresight Institute
has even gone so far as to assert that, within the foreseeable future,
such a nanobox will turn dirt into food, ending world hunger. And
nanotech, it insists, will give humans the power of telepathy.
The Foresight Institute has played a role in publicizing
the field of nanotechnology. Prophets serve a social purpose, even
when they cannot build what they preach, popularizing weird
possibilities that may not be probable, but do help pave the way for
public acceptance of science that some might otherwise consider
satanic. For this and other reasons, respected nanotechnologists are
reluctant to be critical of the Foresight Institute. But some of these
same scientists confide that there is a difference between promoting
nanotechnology in general, and portraying the nanomechanics of K. Eric
Drexler as the cutting edge of the field.
In 1992, Drexler, an engineer, went beyond predicting
the general emergence of nanotechnology: He wrote a book, Nanosystems,
detailing technical particulars. Paul McEuen and several of his
colleagues say that Drexler's drawings of nanothings are just
molecule-sized versions of mechanical devices that have been around
for centuries: gears, cogs, levers, and pistons. If Drexler's peculiar
versions of nanomachines some- day materialize, working physicists
say, his engineer's calculations, which hold true in the world most
people comprehend, will not be of much use in the realm of the very,
very small, because that world is governed by strange scientific laws
known collectively as quantum mechanics.
Scientific investigations of large objects, such as
planets and solar systems, are done via classical physics, the rules
of the universe we know and love. Classical physics declares that
nothing is uncertain, only a consequence of some earlier cause. And
until quantum theory came along at the dawn of the 20th century, the
cause-and-effect determinism of classical physics seemed undeniably
true. Isaac Newton's mechanics of motion, such as gravity and
centripetal force, applied equally to solar systems and children's
merry-go-rounds. James Clerk Maxwell's theories of electromagnetism
showed that electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin.
Technologies developed by classical science lit up our cities and sent
people to the moon.
But the behavior of extremely small objects, such as
elementary particles, is best described by quantum mechanics, the
rules of the atomic world. For nearly 100 years, particle
physicists -- or nanoscientists -- have tested the power of their
quantum theories by measuring the properties of atoms and subatomic
particles such as electrons. So far in human history, the machines
invented by combining the knowledge of quantum mechanics with the
lessons of classical physics have included televisions, nuclear
weapons and reactors, and medical imaging devices.
It is easy to imagine the universe as a giant machine
subject to celestial stresses and strains and cause and effect. In
classical thought, apples fall off trees and stay there, instead of
magically tunneling through the ground, as is possible (although
improbable) in quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is counterintuitive in the extreme.
Even its most famous practitioners, Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein,
were utterly perplexed as to how or why quantum mechanics works. But
it does work, in the sense that it accurately predicts the behavior of
the tiniest components of the universe. In doing so, it turns the laws
of classical physics upside down.
At the quantum level, electrical current can no longer
be handled as if it is a continuous stream of energy; when observed at
the smallest level, electrical energy comes and goes in discrete
little electron packages, instead of constant, measurable flows of
juice.
At the quantum level, conventional measuring techniques
collapse into meaninglessness. There, taking a measurement is no
longer an objective act. It becomes subjective -- the act of measuring
changes the reality that is measured. For instance, the quantum
mechanical rules and regulations, which are well-known and codified,
do not allow electrons, the charged particles that make up electrical
current, to be simultaneously measured for speed and place. If you
want to know how fast an electron is moving you can never know its
position in space at the moment you measure, or observe, its velocity.
And vice versa. This contradiction is called the uncertainty
principle.
Classical physics glories in grasping how the individual
parts of a system connect to determine the larger picture. But the
larger picture underlying quantum mechanics is, above all else,
indeterminate. That is to say, human consciousness cannot perceive a
quantum system as a whole, orderly system built from individually
relating parts.
Because of the quantum uncertainty principle, the act of
observing a small quantum system -- such as electrons flying around
the nucleus of an atom -- destroys the coherence, the inherent
orderliness, of the quantum system. In scientific parlance, what is
coherent "decoheres." And that is a good thing. Without decoherence
our classical universe would blink out of existence, and our personal
electrons would disappear into the cosmic stew. (Another way of
looking at this phenomenon is that observing the orderly,
self-coherent quantum world from the point of view of the classical
world introduces chaos, or randomness, into the quantum world,
allowing it to be observable. In short, what is called order in one
system can be called chaos in another.)
Now, it is becoming possible to build structures so
small that they operate independently of the world ruled by classical
physics, devices so tiny that they directly link to the invisible
quantum universe that lurks inside everything. And while there are no
nanomachines yet in existence, there are nanostructures at sizes
ranging from less than a billionth of a meter up to 10, or maybe 100,
nanometers. (In this sense, a machine is defined as a device with a
definite function, like an engine or microchip; structures are more
passive objects and tend to be pieces of potential machines.)
Scientists and industrial corporations are betting that
these tiny apparatuses will become the foundations of a new
technological order. Public and private money is being heavily pumped
into the research of nanoscientists. The intended effect is to
revolutionize the classical manufacturing methods currently used by
the consumer electronics industry. A technology based on quantum
mechanics may not be just around the corner, but is a holy grail for
futurist crusaders and down-to-earth experimentalists alike.
Stanford University assistant professor Thomas W. Kenny
is a trained physicist who works as a mechanical engineer. Kenny is
comfortable with both classical physics and quantum mechanics. He
makes micromachines, also called Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems,
or MEMS.
Kenny says that defining the size of what qualifies as
nanotechnology depends upon one's point of view. Now that the National
Science Foundation, a federal agency, is gearing up to coordinate the
spending of hundreds of millions of dollars a year on nanotech
research, scientists everywhere have started measuring their
experiments in nanometers, hoping to tap the funding flood. Relatively
large devices may have teeny components. Conventionally sized silicon
transistors, for instance, can be made of layers of chemicals a few
nanometers thick. That does not qualify them as nanomachines, of
course. Most of the people interviewed for this story agreed that
"nanotechnology" best applies to structures with dimensions of less
than 100 nanometers. IBM's Don Eigler, the first person to pick up and
move an individual atom, suggests the outer limit is less than 10
nanometers.
Kenny says that his micromachines have pieces that are
smaller than a micron, which is 1,000 nanometers. Although Kenny
avoids describing his work as nanotechnology, it certainly operates at
the nanotech frontier. His tiny devices are closer to looking like
familiar machines than most nanostructures. Classical physics and
engineering work well for designing Kenny's micromachines, but at a
certain point quantum mechanics rears its many heads.
Like most experimentalists, Kenny works with a group of
graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and he and his
collaborators have found a niche for themselves in academia (and
private industry, too). They are measurers of the ineffable. They make
machines that quantify infinitesimal physical forces or distances,
ranging from wavelengths of light to intercellular tensions in
artificial human skins to the incredibly weak magnetic interactions
between atoms. In partnership with corporations like IBM, Kenny's team
develops what he calls "tool kits" of ultra-ultra-fine sensors and
measuring instruments that have astounding applications.
One of these micromachines, called a silicon cantilever,
is shaped like a thin diving board about 60 nanometers thick and
25,000 nanometers long. There are multiple uses for this device. Used
as the tip of an instrument called an atomic force microscope, for
instance, a cantilever functions like the needle of an old-fashioned
record player that is translating bumps in grooved wax into electronic
frequencies, and then sound. In an atomic force microscope, though,
the cantilever bounces over atoms. A computer uses lasers to measure
the degree of bounce, translating the bounces into pictures of atoms.
Or the cantilever can be used as a writing instrument.
By running a weak electrical current through the cantilever, its
narrow tip can "write" on a flat surface, melting nano-sized pits into
a soft surface. The pits correspond to zeros and ones -- the "bits" in
computer language -- and could one day perform as a "thermomechanical"
data storage system for new generations of smaller, faster, more
powerful computers.
Cantilever machines come in many sizes and shapes and
have many applications. Last year, for instance, one of Kenny's
students, Benjamin W. Chui, invented a cantilever that measures forces
of pushing and pulling at the same time, or "microfriction." Such a
machine is useful in medical research. It can measure, for example,
how much force is being exerted by human skin cells as they grow,
thereby helping in the design of artificial skin.
Heat and friction are the main obstacles to building
ever smaller micromachines. Below a certain size threshold, mechanisms
such as ball bearings, gears, and other mechanical architectures drawn
from the macroworld cannot be lubricated. The movement of
micromachines is, therefore, done by materials designed to flex up and
down, as opposed to rotating or sliding. There is a limit, however, to
how far down the nanoscale familiar mechanical shapes and classical
electronics can function. Somewhere around nanometer-size, quantum
mechanical effects appear, and everything changes.
And at the place where quantum order asserts itself, Tom
Kenny's micromachines give way to nanostructures.
Hongjie Dai grows self-assembling nanotubes from the
bottom up. That's one reason why the China-born physical chemist was
recently awarded a $625,000 research fellowship by the David and
Lucile Packard Foundation. Paul McEuen says that Dai, an assistant
professor of chemistry at Stanford, is one of the world's three top
people in nanotech.
Dai, age 34, is certainly a new breed of scientist. His
research group works simultaneously in chemistry, physics,
engineering, and biology. Yet in some ways Dai is a farmer. His fields
are laboratories full of vacuum pumps and super-hot ovens. He grows
crops of carbon nanotubes. He fertilizes his crops with methane and
other hydrocarbons.
It all started with the buckyball, invented in 1985 by a
Nobel Prize-winning team led by Richard E. Smalley of Rice University.
Smalley's buckyballs -- short for buckminsterfullerenes, a new element
Smalley discovered in his lab -- are incredibly strong molecules made
of carbon atoms. Hongjie Dai, and other nanotubeologists, learned how
to transform the balls into elongated tubes. At first, the long, thin
tubes of strongly bonded carbon atoms grew, noodlelike, in a carbon
soup, all hopelessly entangled with each other.
Dai improved on this manufacturing method by learning
how to grow the carbon nanotubes symmetrically. He heats up his
methane feedstock, dashes in a bit of iron oxide catalyst, and sits
back for an hour. Soon arrays of tubes sprout up in compact, orderly
bundles, looking for all the world like cities of little world trade
centers. This achievement is something on the order of growing
millions of soda straws straight upward into outer space.
Courtesy of Hongjie Dai
Multiple magnifications of nanotubes. (Lengths are given
in microns)
Dai's tubes are, in a sense, the first self-assembling
nanomaterial. In the futurist world of K. Eric Drexler, self-assembly
means that armies of tiny robots build greater armies of tinier
robots, ad infinitum. In the real world, Dai's self-assembly makes use
of the same physical processes of attraction and repulsion that make
the rainwater on a car windshield bead up in an orderly fashion.
The atom-thin nanostructures that Dai grows have several
revolutionary applications, depending on which way the carbon atoms
link to each other. In one form, the nanotubes are a metal. In another
form, the tubes are a semiconductor. Either way, says Dai, the tubes
are 100 times stronger than steel. Used in composite materials, they
may one day be capable of making everything from tennis rackets to
automobiles and airplane frames.
Hongjie Dai's semiconducting nanotubes can also function
as transistors, which means a single tube can be used as a switch to
turn flows of electricity on or off. Or, in a quantum sense, the tubes
can function as controllable gates through which discrete packages of
energy enter and exit. This important function of on-off control lies
at the heart of electronics, classical and quantum.
In another atomic pattern, the crystalline tubes become
metallic wires -- possibly "ballistic" wires, through which
electricity travels almost without losing energy. These extraordinary
wires could enable the production of atom-sized transistors and
electronic circuits powered by single electrons. These wires are so
fine that they can be connected to atom-sized electrodes in electronic
circuits measured in angstroms. (There are 10 angstroms in a
nanometer.) This interconnectivity means that it may one day be
possible to construct the most mind-boggling machine yet imagined by
the human brain: the quantum computer.
Michael F. Crommie moves individual atoms around like
some people move poker chips: He slides them one by one into piles.
Only he does it with a scanning tunneling microscope. That's why the
Physics Department at the University of California at Berkeley
recently hired Crommie -- and the rather incredible microscope he put
together piece by piece -- away from Boston University.
Crommie, age 37, was born in Southern California, where
his father, an aerospace engineer, designed heat shields for the
Apollo moon program. Crommie says he "grew up wanting to build
spaceships, like Dad." Instead, the younger Crommie ended up going
about as far inside space as one can get. Using his scanning tunneling
microscope, Crommie finds lone atoms, and then pushes them into
geometric structures called quantum corrals.
In Crommie's wild and woolly frontier world, quantum
mechanics calls the shots. His microscope doesn't magnify -- it
"tunnels." What does that mean? It means that electrons sitting at the
tip of the microscope's thin probe do the impossible: They shoot
through barriers that the rules of classical physics absolutely forbid
an electron to pass.
Imagine a golf ball rolling down a slight slope until it
hits a brick wall. Classical physics says that the ball does not have
enough energy to pass through the brick wall. But quantum mechanics
says that there is an extremely small probability that the golf ball
will jump through the wall and continue to roll on the other side.
(Although possible, this event is so improbable that it would take
several ages of our universe for it to occur.)
But if the golf ball were an electron riding a
conductive wire, and the brick wall a piece of atom-scale insulation,
the seemingly impossible would become probable. Quantum mechanics says
there is a definite probability that the electron will jump, or
"tunnel," through the insulation-barrier and appear on the other side
to continue its journey. The reason that this apparent magic can
happen: The barrier is only a few atoms thick, and the mathematics of
quantum mechanics says that at the scale of a few atoms, electrons
will jump through the insulation a quantifiable percentage of the
time. Above a certain thickness, the probability of tunneling falls
off dramatically.
And this is why quantum effects can play havoc on
electronics at the small scales: If electrons jump willy-nilly through
insulating barriers in electronic circuits, the circuits short out.
Learning how to control the flight of electrons is one of the
principal focuses of nanoscience. Crommie wants his electrons to
tunnel only upon command.
At the tip of Crommie's scanning tunneling microscope
electrons jump off through space, to atoms resting on a surface. This
creates a measurable electrical current. Slight fluctuations in the
current are transmitted to Crommie's computer, which turns electrical
variations into pictures of atoms.
These atoms do not look anything at all like the
classical models of atoms we learned to draw in grade school (that is,
tiny solar systems with electrons whizzing in orbits about a nucleus).
Crommie's atoms-on-a-surface resemble ball bearings nestled in
corrugated egg cartons. What the microscope sees is the electron cloud
that surrounds the nucleus of the atom and interacts with other atoms.
Pictures of atoms can be used to study their essential properties: how
they sit and move, and how they repel and bind to one another.
Courtesy of IBM Research Division
Atomic corral with probability waves
The scanning tunneling microscope has another trick,
too. The tip of its probe can stick to individual atoms lying on a
surface and move them into, say, circles. These are the quantum
corrals. The microscope can then take pictures of how electrons
confined inside a corral of atoms behave. (More precisely, the
pictures are graphic representations of the probability waves created
by the ephemeral electrons. The probability waves, which look like
ripples in a pond, reflect measurements made by the microscope, and
are graphical presentations of the probability of electrons being
present in a certain space. Where there are crests in the waves, there
are probably more electrons.)
The ability to move individual atoms is key to building
nanomachines, not just nanostructures. The first atom-sized machines
are likely to be switches, inside which atomic structures function as
conductors and insulators, like today's microchips, but many times
smaller and more efficient.
Crommie says his group's work is "pretty far ahead of
today's industrial applications." But he expects the not-too-distant
future to feature devices in which individual atoms function like
toggles in a household light switch. The problem with Crommie's
nanotechnology right now is that it all takes place at temperatures a
few degrees above absolute zero, where the nearly perpetual movement
of atoms is stilled. Whereas Tom Kenny's cantilevers, and Hongjie
Dai's nanotubes, work at room temperature, Crommie's even smaller
structures jitter themselves into smithereens at normal temperatures.
Like many of his colleagues, though, Crommie looks to the living body
for inspiration. DNA, proteins, and cells of all sorts already
function as self-assembling nanoscale machines in animals and plants,
and they function at normal temperatures.
Charles Marcus, nanotechnologist and professor of
physics at Stanford, shows off an artificial atom -- a quantum dot.
Peering through the lenses of an optical microscope, it is possible to
see little gold wires trailing off into nothingness. "Somewhere down
there," muses Marcus, "is our little device."
Marcus is a nanotech enthusiast; as such, he believes
that scientists should be dreamers. But it is important not to confuse
scientific dreaming with the real thing, he opines. Like all
nanoscientists, Marcus is aware that the media's perception of
nanotech is largely shaped by the Foresight Institute. Marcus says he
has nothing against the Foresight Institute's predictions. But ...
"Eric Drexler's book contains some useful engineering
formulas. It's just not useful to my research. And I think it's fair
to say that the future of nanostuff will be even wilder than Drexler
has imagined," Marcus remarks.
Marcus' quantum dots usually live in the bottom of
super-cooled refrigerators where electricity and magnetic fields are
applied experimentally to test the dots' properties. A quantum dot can
be as big as 500 nanometers, but its "walls" are only a few atoms
thick. One of the most amazing things about a quantum dot is its
ability to "element-shift." By changing the voltage of the electricity
flowing through the dot, the artificial atom can mimic any one of the
more than 100 elements appearing in the periodic table, such as
hydrogen, magnesium, carbon, or potassium. It can also make elements
that never yet existed by simply adding extra electrons to the mix.
The quantum dot's chameleon quality occurs because it
"traps" electrons inside its structure. Depending on how many
electrons it traps, it roughly assumes the characteristics of an
element. It is easy to speculate about the future use of artificial
atoms as manufacturing materials, once they are released from their
super-low temperature cages. But using quantum dots as switches and
components in electrical circuits could also be the basis of a new
kind of quantum computing, says Marcus. Such quantum machines, also
known as nanocomputers, would make today's most powerful computers
look like prehistoric counting sticks.
If the basic paradox of chaos and order can be overcome.
Quantum mechanics' uncertainty principle says that
before an atomic particle is measured, it exists in all possible
states, all superimposed on one another. An electron, for example, is
best described by what physicists term a "probability wave function,"
a mathematical expression that describes the chance that the electron
is traveling at a range of speeds over a range of places. Once you
measure its speed or position, quantum reality decoheres, the
indefinite wave function "collapses," and either its speed or its
position becomes definite. But not both at once.
Marcus says, "Once a measurement has been made, then all
of the possible ways that things could have come out vanish, leaving
only the way in which things did come out."
Re-enter the quantum dot, which connects the classical
and quantum worlds. Inside the dot, electrons can be trapped and
controlled for certain amounts of time. The theory of quantum
computing shows that if information is stored in the dot's trapped
electrons, before the electrons are measured all of the superimposed
possibilities form an ultra- complex database.
If quantum computing comes about, less space will hold
more information.
Think of it this way: Today's transistors, or
microswitches, can be controllably switched to either state 0 or state
1 -- the either/or phenomenon that makes electronic computing
possible. The 0s and 1s are coded bits of classical information.
Computing capacity depends on how many switches can be built and
interconnected.
In quantum computers, quantum bits, or "qubits," can be
in both state 0 and state 1 at the same time, superimposed on one
another. Theoretically, the ability to create databases of qubits and
connect to them will shrink computers and increase their powers of
calculation astronomically. But in the present, qubits have not been
realized, because it is impossible to access the data without causing
decoherence to set in, which destroys the information. And what is the
use of storing information in the quantum universe, when attempts to
access it import chaos and destroy the data?
Despite this almost ontological problem, Charles Marcus
and many of his nanotechnologist colleagues believe that further
experimentation with quantum dots could well lead to the development
of a quantum computer. In the meantime, Marcus is also working on
fabricating quantum wires to connect the quantum universe to the
classical world. In that pursuit, he's in a collective that includes
Hongjie Dai, Mike Crommie, Paul McEuen, and thousands of other
experimentalists.
Paul McEuen shows a visitor his lab. "My mom was
disappointed. She thought it would be full of beakers and Dr.
Frankenstein stuff," he grins. It looks like a weekend hobbyist's
basement full of water heaters, gaffer's tape, and abandoned
screwdrivers. But the water heaters are $250,000 refrigerators full of
liquid helium and quantum dots.
It costs a lot of money to do nanotech, which is why
university labs are umbilically tied to the U.S. government. The
National Science Foundation is heading up a task force of
scientist-bureaucrats from NASA, the Department of Defense, the
Department of Energy, and several other federal agencies; this group
is trying to control developments in nanotechnology, and, to this end,
the U.S. government is planning to spend hundreds of millions of
dollars on basic nanoscience research over the next two years. It is
likely that nanotech manufacturing will become profitable once it
passes the research stage. That's why the labs of multinational
cybercorporations like IBM and Raychem are also heavily invested in
nanotech research.
Those involved in nanotechnology regularly express a
degree of social consciousness often missing in experimentalists.
McEuen does not necessarily believe that nanotechnology will solve
humanity's problems; he does hope that as biology, chemistry, and
physics continue to intersect in the pursuit of nanosolutions, human
beings will connect more deeply with their environment. "If everybody
lives the way we live here," he says, "the planet is doomed. We'll run
out of raw materials and kill everything."
But the technology of the infinitesimal is amoral. It is
a tool that spans two viewpoints of reality -- classical physics and
quantum mechanics -- with wonderful power. The results of
nanoinvention -- which will likely include powerful weapons
applications, as well as, one can hope, more benign and useful
devices -- will change how the world operates its machines. But it
cannot change how people operate in the world.
In 1995, the Rand Corp., a government-linked think tank
located in Santa Monica, published a study on the potential of
nanotechnology. The Rand paper relied heavily on the writings of K.
Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute.
The Rand Corp.'s authors concluded that nanotechnology
would best be used to "take advantage of indigenous resources found on
asteroids, comets, or planets for mining; defending Earth against
impacts; or tools to assist extensive colonization of the solar system
on a reasonable time scale." There was no mention of ending world
hunger.
by Peter Byrne
All rights reserved.
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