------------------- 1846 - Nanotechnology from Chemistry to Biology.
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- New technology will be designing machines so small they will be using individual atoms. Molecular manufacturing creates new materials with new and amazing properties.
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- The potential of nanotechnology has convinced the government (2009) to allocate 1.5 billion dollars for research.
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- The laws of physics do not remain the same as you go down to smaller and smaller scales. Other forces dominate the atomic scale, examples: atomic binding and Van Der Waals forces.
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- An example is when water freezes. Water molecules are “V” shaped, H2O. The 2 hydrogen atoms on top have a slight negative charge. The oxygen at the bottom has a slight positive charge. When water freezes the molecules stack in a regular lattice. Ice expands as water molecules arrange in these hexagon shapes. Ice floats. Snow flakes have 6 sides.
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- Atoms are largely empty space between the nucleus and the cloud of electrons. You can not walk through walls because the quantum forces between them stop you. If the atom were a football stadium the nucleus would be a grain of sand. It is not an empty vacuum inside the stadium. Quantum forces fill the entire arena and these forces make things feel solid.
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- These forces begin with the Pauli Exclusion Principle that prevents any two electrons from occupying the same state of orbit or spin. If electrons approach each other they repel. Matter is “solid” as an illusion It is basically empty.
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- Sitting in this chair I am basically floating a nanometer above it being repelled by the chair’s electromagnetic and quantum forces.
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- The reason atoms can become molecules is that electrons can be shared by 2 adjacent atoms. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the electron is “smeared” between the 2 atoms, even being in 2 places at once. This process stacks atoms all the way up the Periodic Table and across all the molecules in all of matter.
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--------------------- The new laws of the small include:
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--------------------- You can not know the exact velocity and position of any particle, there is always uncertainty and a trade offs between the two.
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-------------------- Particles can be in 2 places at once.
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------------------- Particles are a mixture of different states , simultaneously.
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------------------- Particles can disappear and reappear somewhere else.
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- This bizarre Quantum Theory has only one thing going for it. It is correct. Its accuracy has never been found to be wrong. In the macro-scale with trillions and trillions of atoms these effects all average out and these quantum effects do not exist in our perceived reality.
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- To make miniature machines out of atoms we need to move one atom at a time. This is done today with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. It uses a fine needle. The tip being a single atom that passes over the material. The electric current in the tip changes slightly every time it passes over a single atom. The microscope can print out the outline of all the atoms or even move them around.
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- Another device is the Atomic Force Microscope which can record a 3-D image of an array of atoms. Again the needle with the fine point is used except a laser records the jiggle of the needle. Computers can convert these jiggles into an atomic 3-D image.
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- Nanotechnology today is a booming business in spraying on chemical coatings on clothing, computer screens, cutting tools, and MEMS.
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- MEMS are Micro Electromechanical Systems used in ink-jet cartridges, air bag sensors, gyroscopes , accelerometers, earth quake detectors, …
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- Soon these tiny machines will be the size of a pill that can enter your body and be tracked electronically. The tiny machines can deliver medicines to a precise location inside the body. They can search out tumors and destroy them. Chemotherapy drugs can be placed only on the cancer cells.
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- The silicon-based computer improves in the ability using ultraviolet light (shortest wavelength, 10 nanometers) to etch smaller and smaller transistors on to a wafer of silicon. Due to the Uncertainty Principle there is a limit to how small a silicon transistor can be.
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- Parallel Processing is a way to solve this problem. The human brain operates at 200 miles per hour. A turtle’s speed compared to a computer’s light-neck speed, 186,000 miles per second. But, the brain is doing billions of small calculations simultaneously in parallel than adding them together to get results. Parallel Processing is a technique that can solve complex problems faster.
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- Another way to solve the problem is to make the transistor itself smaller. Electron beam etching on graphene can make a transistor one-atom thick and 10 atoms across.
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- Another way to solve the problem is not use the transistor at all. Use the single atom itself. Atoms have binary spin, Spin-up = “0”. Spin-down = “1”. However, in the Quantum World the atom is spinning up and down at the same time and only collapses into one or the other when a photon observes it.
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- To solve this problem use “qubits” rather than “bits” with say 25% spinning up and 75% spinning down. The problem today with “ qubits” is that the slightest disturbance from the outside environment can destroy these delicate properties of the atoms.
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- Quantum Dots are collections of about 100 atoms. They may someday allow Quantum computing at room temperatures.
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- Your body’s DNA encodes information on amino acids not in “1” or “0” but in “A”, , “T”, “C”, “G”. Maybe this is the way to design a DNA computer.
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- Biology is getting closer to learning what each gene in a living cell is doing. They are doing this by removing DNA codes in bacterium to learn the minimum needed to be “alive”.
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- Biologists have got down to 531,000 DNA blocks containing just 473 genes. For comparison we humans have 3,000,000,000 building blocks with more than 20,000 genes.
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- The DNA code, the “genome”, contained in the simplest bacterium is still extremely complex. The minimum genome an organism needs depends on the environment in which it is to live.
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- Ultimately biologists hope by knowing what each gene is doing we can produce organisms that are medicines, fuels, nutrition, and other machines with endless applications.
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- Stay tuned, an announcement will be made shortly.
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- Request these Reviews to learn more:
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- #664 - Nanotechnology 2006
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- #574 - Nanotechnology 2005
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- #1230 - Nanotube weirdness of the very small.
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- #627 - Nanowire solar cells.
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- #851 - The nanotube radio.
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