"Great acts are made up of small deeds."
Lao Tzu
6. Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the engineering of tiny, microscopic systems which are able to manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic scale. Today I'm going to describe Nanotechnology through the best analogies I can think of of along with listing it's possible uses.
First of all we'll need to know about the scales that we're talking about. Nanotechnology usually relates to sizes measured in nanometres.
What's a nanometre?
Well take a centimetre ruler.
Find a millimetre on there ... no divide that by one million.
Yeah, so small our brains can't really fathom it. The width of a human hair is about 100,000 nanometres wide and you can think of one nanometre as 10 hydrogen atoms long.
If you'd like to visualise this scale easier there's an interactive 'journey' into the scales of the large and small available here.
Nanotechnology is the engineering of tiny, microscopic systems which are able to manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic scale. Today I'm going to describe Nanotechnology through the best analogies I can think of of along with listing it's possible uses.
First of all we'll need to know about the scales that we're talking about. Nanotechnology usually relates to sizes measured in nanometres.
What's a nanometre?
Well take a centimetre ruler.
Find a millimetre on there ... no divide that by one million.
Yeah, so small our brains can't really fathom it. The width of a human hair is about 100,000 nanometres wide and you can think of one nanometre as 10 hydrogen atoms long.
If you'd like to visualise this scale easier there's an interactive 'journey' into the scales of the large and small available here.
*Credit to Cary and Michael Huang for Scale of the Universe 2
I'd really suggest you check this out, really amazing.
Right to back to the nanometres, right?
At this small scale you'd think making a few changes here and there would not really make a difference at all ... well you'd be wrong. Think of the saying attributed from Aesop 'United we stand, Divided we fall'
Well think of this more or less, changing round the structure of the microscopic does not make all matter crumble but rather it makes it behave in different ways.
For example lets look at carbon. A rather 'basic' atom - basic in the sense it makes up all life around us, the organic element so to speak.
I'd really suggest you check this out, really amazing.
Right to back to the nanometres, right?
At this small scale you'd think making a few changes here and there would not really make a difference at all ... well you'd be wrong. Think of the saying attributed from Aesop 'United we stand, Divided we fall'
Well think of this more or less, changing round the structure of the microscopic does not make all matter crumble but rather it makes it behave in different ways.
For example lets look at carbon. A rather 'basic' atom - basic in the sense it makes up all life around us, the organic element so to speak.
One of the forms you can find carbon in is coal, nowadays if we found a lump of coal just lying there we would just walk straight past it right?
But you wouldn't walk straight past a diamond.
Now if you have a knowledge of atomic structure or even a bit of chemistry you're going to know what I'm going on about but if you don't bare with me ...
You see, coal and diamond are both made of carbon
But you wouldn't walk straight past a diamond.
Now if you have a knowledge of atomic structure or even a bit of chemistry you're going to know what I'm going on about but if you don't bare with me ...
You see, coal and diamond are both made of carbon
but by changing it's structure we get two very different things.
This is one of the many uses of nanotechnology - manipulating matter in order to change what it is.
Another use is in medicine. Scientists that work on nanotechnology want to create self replicating nanotech' like, similar to bacteria. Nanotechnology with a specific goal could be inserted into a person and become almost like anti-bodies which could self-replicate. Again when treating people with a certain disease if we think about the small scale we could eradicate it much faster. By thinking in the scale of the small we ca get almost anything done.
Nanotech' will also be big in production. Battery's could be made more effective if they had nanotechnology components, material such as carbon nanotubes can be made with the use of nanotechnology and certain components for circuit boards can be made this way to.
If we can truly master the world beyond the microscope the possibilities to what we could do are ... again endless.
Thanks for reading, Chris.
Nanotech' will also be big in production. Battery's could be made more effective if they had nanotechnology components, material such as carbon nanotubes can be made with the use of nanotechnology and certain components for circuit boards can be made this way to.
If we can truly master the world beyond the microscope the possibilities to what we could do are ... again endless.
Thanks for reading, Chris.
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