In 1999, Brad Chase was one of a dozen Microsoft executives spending a large amount of time defending the company against antitrust charges.
Attempting to explain why AOL had chosen Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over the then market-leading Netscape Navigator, Chase used the following analogy: “From my point of view as a programmer, the difference is like that between Stone Age technology and nanotechnology.”
As comments like Chase’s make clear, the concept of nanotechnology has been getting increasing visibility over the past few years. Long a staple of science fiction, references to nanotechnology are now just as likely to appear in company prospectuses or courtroom transcripts. In the same way that vague visions of e-business drove
Western economies in the late 1990s, nanotechnology has become an early candidate to define our views of science, technology, and business in the next century. Is that outlook justified, or will the nanotechnology hype prove to be so much hot air?
Nanotechnology 101
In its most basic form, nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of materials at the atomic or molecular level. The name derives from the nanometre, a scientific measurement unit representing a billionth of a metre. To use an oft-quoted comparison, a human hair is between 100,000 and 200,000 nanometres thick, while a typical virus can be just 100 nanometres wide. Atoms themselves are typically between one-tenth and half of a nanometre wide. Because of the difficulties involved in working at this scale, activities involving manipulation of items as “large” as 100 nanometres are generally included in the concept of nanotechnology.
Most discussions about nanotechnology race fairly quickly away from the intricacies of molecular manipulation itself and onto the sexier futuristic concept of nanomachines or nanobots: microscopic devices that can themselves carry out tasks at the atomic or sub-atomic level.
A Time overview of how the next century will progress gives a typical vision: “They will be building our cars one molecule at a time, invading our bloodstream to declog our arteries, and replicating themselves thousands of times over.”
A frequently used point of reference is the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, in which a team of scientists (including Raquel Welch) are miniaturised, placed in a tiny submarine and injected into a sick man’s bloodstream. Given that nanotechnology invariably involves work on a much smaller scale than the average blood cell, we suspect the popularity of the reference has a lot to do with the widespread desire to have Raquel Welch anywhere in your body. It also reflects one of the trickier elements involved in nanotechnology: the imaginative leap required to envisage something that damn small.
It’s important to note that this kind of atomic construction isn’t a particularly new concept. Physicist Richard Feynman first raised the idea of building machines out of individual atoms in 1959 when he famously observed: “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of manoeuvring things atom by atom.” Feynman’s paper, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, is a classic text for nanotechnology, alongside Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation, which examined the ethical issues associated with this rapidly evolving field. (After that, you’re plunged fairly quickly into the impenetrable world of scientific journals.)
Advances in technology since Feynman’s and Drexler’s work have made nanomachines a more realistic prospect, particularly the development of electron microscopes capable of basic (if slow) molecular manipulation. However, the fundamental concept hasn’t yet changed. If you can construct objects at the molecular level, you can theoretically build anything, since all objects are made up of molecules.
Translating from concept to practice is trickier. While many plans have been drawn up for simple nanomachines such as gears and motors, actually building them is still fiendishly difficult and rather expensive. The most famous “working” nanomachine is probably the nanoguitar constructed by Cornell University researchers in 1997.
Just 10,000 nanometres wide, the nanoguitar has six strings, each just 50 nanometres wide. Of course, without a nano-ear to listen to its 10MHz output, the guitar is fairly useless, but it demonstrates that simple machines can be constructed on a nanometric scale.
Producing nanomachines on a commercial basis will undoubtedly prove more challenging, since atomic manipulation, while not theoretically contrary to the laws of physics, is still extremely slow and costly.
Nanomachines are also built using a “bottom up” process, unlike most current manufacturing processes, which use “top down” processes to make changes to existing materials. As such, researchers are working in largely uncharted territory.
The most widely discussed long-term solution is to make the nanomachines self-replicating; what better way to build a microscopic machine than have a microscopic machine do it?
Control mechanisms for such systems (how does a machine know how to build a copy of itself, and how does it know when to stop doing so?) are still in their very early stages, and once again theory is a fair way ahead of practical reality.
Another major issue is the question of whether nano-constructed objects will actually behave in the same way as their natural equivalents. Some nanotechnology research is explicitly designed to produce objects that differ from natural ones, such as glass that is transparent but shatters less easily. Unlike the glass, it is far from clear whether an object built molecule by molecule will have equivalent characteristics to its real-world double, especially since most objects we recognise and understand are massively complex in molecular terms.
“We are just beginning to understand how to use nanotechnology to build devices and machines that imitate the elegance and economy of nature,” Charles Vest, the president of MIT, observed recently. “The gathering nanotechnology revolution will eventually make possible a huge leap in computing power, vastly stronger yet much lighter materials, advances in medical technologies, as well as devices and processes with much lower energy and environmental costs.
Nanotechnology may well rival the development of the transistor or telecommunications in its ultimate impact.”
While we wait for that revolution, nanotechnology is already producing useful results. It may be a while before nanoguitar-toting micro-bands are shooting up the chart, but some research projects are demonstrating real-world usefulness right now.
Many of the more recent practical applications of nanotechnology don’t actually involve full development on a nanometric scale, even though they draw heavily on the theories involved with the field. Much recent development has been in the area of materials research, but scientists believe that transistors could also eventually be built in this way, paving the way for computational technologies which don’t depend on silicon and which can pack even more circuitry into microscopic spaces.
Nanotechnology of this type is also being explored for potential medical applications, although we’re unlikely to see these in Raquel Welch’s lifetime.
Nano technology will change in orders of dimension the way things are done today but has considerable dangers if used improperly.
The CSIRO already has protoypes and patents using 'nano materials' to measure forces on all types of materials that can be used for a wide range of practicle applications.
However, what Austrlia needs is its ability to commercialise its R&D and retain talent that works at the stage of commercial product development, that follows on from organisations like the CSIRO. Taking it from pure research to commercialising product is something Australia needs to get a lot better at and provide incentives for.
Australia's (and all other countries for that matter) challenge will be whether it is able to develop large scale complex commercial software that meets real market needs, is robust and maintainable, to exploit the enormous power available. Currently its software development practices and management need considerable improvement (there are some pockets of excellence) at leading, managing and making good use of the high tech software talent that exists in this country. The U.S certainly isnt showing leadership in this area, but it appears that India is one that is.
So the real issue will be needing strong management leadership talent to utilise and retain the high tech R & D talent within Australia that works at the commecialisation end of the process. It needs to be able to compete in a very competitive global market where the likes of India appears to be taking more the market share in large scale software development.
Perhaps with more government support of software R & D using nano technology beyond pure research and emphasis within the software industry on management leadership talent/skills in addition to pure tech skills, we may be able to move towards being world leaders in this area and retaining both our management/leadership and high technical talent pool.