Nanotechnology

What Is Nanotechnology?

Computers reproduce information at almost no cost. Bu treating atoms discretely, like computers treat bits of information. This would allow automatic construction of consumer’s goods without traditional labor, like a Xerox machine produces unlimited copies without a human retyping the original information. Electronics is fueled by miniaturization. Working smaller has led to the tools capable of manipulate the atoms of soil, air and water to make copies of it.

The shotgun marriage of chemistry and engineering called “nanotechnology” is ushering in the era of self-replicating machinery and self assembling consumer goods made from cheap raw atoms (drexler, merkle paraphrased).

Self-Replicant And Nanotechnology

A circular objective of nanotechnology is the ability to make products inexpensively. While the ability to make a few very small, very precise molecular machines very expensively would clearly be a major scientific achievement, it would not fundamentally change how we make most products.

Fortunately, we are surrounded and inspired by products that are marvelously complex and yet very inexpensive. By watching birds soar effortlessly through the air, so we can take inspiration from nature as we develop molecular manufacturing systems. Airplanes are very different from birds: a 747 bears only the smallest resemblance to a duck even though both fly. The artificial self replicating systems that have been envisioned for molecular manufacturing bear about the same degree of similarity to their biological counterparts as a car might bear to a horse.

 Abstract

      Miniaturization. It’s a word we’ve become accustomed to over the last few decades. We’ve heard that computers that took up whole rooms half a century ago can now easily fit on to a microchip that sits on the tip of your finger. But what if we could go even much, much smaller than that? There are researchers who are trying to do just this. Their Field is called nanotechnology. It is derived from the word nanometer. Nanotechnology is a broad tern that describes many approaches to measurement tools, production methods, and devices that operate on that scale f one-billionth meter. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That’s a thousand, million times smaller than a meter.

Conclusion

Our modern technology builds on an ancient tradition. Thirty thousands years ago chipping flint was the high technology of the day. Our ancestor grasped stones containing trillions of atoms and removed chips containing billions of trillions of atoms to make their ax heads. They made fine work with skills difficult to imitate today. This nanotechnology builds the chips at molecular level, instead of burning the features on the silicon chips. We call the product “chips” and we consider them exquisitely small, at least in comparison to ax heads.