It's a Small World. Very Small.

Editor's Note

February / March 2005 By: Bob Cochnar Volume 3 Number 1

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Welcome to the teeny-tiny world of nanotechnology. Because this world is unseen by the naked eye (and even by powerful microscopes), we had a devil of a time coming up with a suitable cover illustration for this issue. If you can't see it, how do you depict it?

Phillip Ortiz, our crack cover illustrator, read widely in the literature and all of us bounced ideas hither and yon. You can be the judge of our success, or lack thereof.

"Nano," by the way, derives from the Greek word for dwarf. As you'll discover when you read the articles in our special report, nano is used as a prefix for any unit such as a second or a liter and it means a billionth of that unit. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second (mighty fast). A nanoliter is one billionth of a liter—€”about the length of several atoms in a line. The little tail, or serif, at the bottom of this letter "l" is roughly one million nanometers.

The web site of the federal government's Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, or CINT, offers a useful explanation:

"A world of things is built up from the tiny scale of nanometers. Just consider the thousands of cellular proteins and enzymes that do everything from metabolizing hamburgers to building up muscle fibers to replicating DNA, whose twisty structure itself is a few nanometers thick.

"Enzymes typically are constructions of thousands of atoms in precise molecular structures that span some tens of nanometers. That kind of natural nanotechnology is about ten times smaller than some of the smallest synthetic nanotechnology humanity has made so far.

"Nanotechnology researchers say today's microelectronics are mere hints of what will come from engineering that begins on the small scale of nanostructures."
In other words, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

In this issue you'll learn what several of our national laboratories are doing in the nano arena. To say the least, it's startling.

The discipline can be traced to observations made in 1959 by Richard Feynman, the Nobel Laureate in Physics. In a lecture at CalTech, he said:
"It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction."

And he added, with extraordinary foresight (Feynman was, after all, a genius):
"Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want—€”that we can manufacture an object that moves at that level!"
That's next.

Not everything in this issue deals with nanotechnology. You'll want to know that the Patent Office (Page 7) is facing a sea of troubles, which doesn't help patent applicants much. Susan Gorges, in an article beginning on Page 21, notes that launching a successful new technology has more to do with timing than anything else. She quotes the Law of Leadership: "It is better to be first than to be better."

And, beginning on Page 23, the researchers at the Rocky Mountain Institute argue that the U.S. can end its dependence on foreign oil by 2040. "To achieve this," they write, "does not require a revolution, but merely consolidating and accelerating trends already in place: the amount of oil the economy uses for each dollar of GDP produced, and the fuel efficiency of light vehicles, would need only to improve about as three-fifths as quickly as they did in response to previous oil shocks."

Too simple? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The Institute's proposal is, at least, provocative.