An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds

Author:Glenn Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

9

EMPOWERING THE

REALLY LITTLE GUYS

All sorts of new technologies promise to empower individuals, but the ultimate empowerer of ordinary people may well turn out to be nanotechnology, the much-hyped but still important technology of molecular manufacturing and computing. Indeed, for all the nano-hype, the reality of nanotechnology may turn out to exceed the claims. The result may be as big a change as the Industrial Revolution, but in a different direction.

Nanotechnology derives its name from the nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, and refers to the manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level. The ideas behind nanotechnology are simple ones: every substance on Earth is made up of molecules composed of one or more atoms (the smallest particles of elements). To describe the molecules that constitute a physical object and how they interrelate is to say nearly everything important about the object. It follows, then, that if you can manipulate individual atoms and molecules and put them together in certain configurations, you should be able to create just about anything you desire. And if technologies like computers and the Internet have empowered individuals by giving them drastically more control over the organization of information, the impact of nanotechnology— which promises similar control over the material world—is likely to be much greater. This goes well beyond home-brewing beer, though, as with making beer, nanotechnology involves letting someone else do the hard work at the microscopic level.

Richard Feynman’s first description of nanotechnology still serves:

The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. . . . [I]t would be, in principle, possible for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed—a development which I think cannot be avoided.1

Modern nanotechnology researchers want to go beyond synthesizing “substances” (though that has great importance) to use nanotechnology’s atom-by-atom construction techniques to produce objects: tiny, bacterium-sized devices that can repair clogged arteries, kill cancer cells, fix cellular damage from aging, and (via what are called “assemblers”) make other devices of greater size or complexity by plugging atoms, one at a time, into the desired arrangements, very quickly. Other researchers believe that nanotechnology will allow for a degree of miniaturization that might permit computers a millionfold more efficient than anything available now. Still others believe that nanotechnology’s tiny devices will be able to unravel mysteries of the microscopic world (such as cell metabolism, the aging process, and cancer) in ways that other tools will not be able to.

So far, pioneers like Eric Drexler and Robert Freitas have worked out a lot of the details, and research has produced some small devices, but nothing as exotic as those described above. But nanotechnologists are refining both their instrumentation and their understanding of nanofabrication at an accelerating rate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.