Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology comprises technological developments on the nanometer scale, usually 0.1 to 100 nm. (One nanometer equals one thousandth of a micrometer or one millionth of a millimeter.) The term has sometimes been applied to microscopic technology. This article discusses nanotechnology, nanoscience, and "molecular nanotechnology."

History

Around 450 B.C. the Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus proposed the idea of atoms. Democritus described a thought experiment (gedanken experiment) in which a piece of copper would be divided in half, then divided in half again and again until an indivisible piece of copper was left. The indivisible piece was named an atom.

Related Topics:
Democritus - Leucippus - Thought experiment - Copper - Atom

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Aristotle cast the atomic idea into disrepute, and it languished until the 1800's, when a paper by John Dalton in 1803 described the basics of a modern atomic theory of matter. But for the next 156 years no one paid much attention to the idea of manipulating individual atoms.

Related Topics:
Aristotle - John Dalton - 1803

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The first discussion of nanotechnology (not yet using that term) occurred in a talk given by Richard Feynman in 1959, entitled There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Feynman suggested that it should be possible to manipulate atoms and molecules directly, an idea which was later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope. Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation, and he presented the "weird possibility" of building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop. This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations. (This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert Heinlein in his 1940 short novel Waldo.) As the sizes got smaller, some tools would require redesign because the relative strength of various forces would change. Gravity would become less important, surface tension would become more important, Van der Waals attraction would become important, etc. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during his talk. No one has attempted to implement this thought experiment.

Related Topics:
Richard Feynman - 1959 - There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom - Molecule - Scanning tunneling microscope - Atomic force microscope - Massively parallel - Robert Heinlein - Waldo - Gravity - Surface tension - Van der Waals

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The term Nanotechnology was coined by Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precision manufacture of materials with nanometre tolerances. In the 1980s the term was unknowingly appropriated by K. Eric Drexler to describe what later became known as molecular nanotechnology, particularly in his 1986 book '. Drexler took the Feynman concept of a billion tiny factories and added the idea that they could make more copies of themselves, via computer control instead of control by a human operator.

Related Topics:
Tokyo Science University - Norio Taniguchi - 1974 - 1980s - K. Eric Drexler - 1986

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Drexler contemplated molecular nanotechnology in much greater conjectural detail in his 1991 MIT Media Lab doctoral dissertation, later expanded into Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nanosystems.html. Because no set of fabrication methods for producing MNT nanosystems yet exists, computational methods play a key role in designing and simulating virtual molecular systems.

Related Topics:
1991 - MIT - Media Lab

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Early discussions of molecular nanotechnology involved the notion of a general-purpose assembler with a broad range of capability used to build different molecular structures. The notion of self-replication, the idea that assemblers could build more assemblers to achieve massive parallelism, suggests that MNT might reduce the price of many physical goods by several orders of magnitude. Self-replication is also the basis for the grey goo scenario. Recent MNT studies have focused instead on a more factory-oriented approach to hypothetical nanoscale construction (see nanofactory). The smallest elements of a product would be built on assembly lines, then assembled into progressively larger assemblies until the final product was complete.

Related Topics:
Grey goo - Nanofactory

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In 2005, a computer-animated short film of the nanofactory concept was produced by John Burch, in collaboration with Drexler. The animation also is available in streaming media format.

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