It's a small word after all.

• Author: Ratner, Dan
• Position: Science & Technology - Nanotechnology

"... Nanotechnology deals with devices that are 1/1,000th the width of a human hair or, to put it another way, as much smaller than a football as a football is smaller than the distance from the Earth to the moon."

IN NOVEMBER, 2003, Congress passed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Development and Research Act, authorizing the spending of more than $3,700,000,000 on government programs for nanotechnology. The Act contains legislation creating a permanent Federal agency for nanotechnology which will help coordinate the efforts of other agencies interested in this curious new science. Moreover, everyone, it seems, is interested--the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and all branches of the armed services. Universities and national laboratories also have taken note. Argonne National Laboratory, for instance, recently appointed a director for its nanotechnology center while similar centers are on the horizon at Harvard, Rice, Northwestern, and Stanford universities, to name a few. Corporations are on board as well--IBM, General Electric, and Hewlett-Packard are among its strongest supporters with a host of start-ups continually joining the ever-burgeoning field.

So what is nanotechnology and why is there suddenly so much importance attached to it? At its core, nanotechnology involves the engineering of matter at its ultimate scale, the scale of individual molecules, the design scale of nature. To illustrate, nanotechnology deals with devices that are 1/1,000th the width of a human hair or, to put it another way, as much smaller than a football as a football is smaller than the distance from the Earth to the moon. While there may be a certain innate elegance in being able to manipulate mailer and create devices at this ultimate design scale (anything smaller is just a dilute speck of vapor), nanotechnology matters because, at that dimension, the properties of the quantum, biological. and the material worlds all come together and allow scientists to do things that simply could not be accomplished any other way.

Although barely out of its infancy, nanotechnology is revolutionizing several industries--the computer display market, for example. Despite a struggling economy, this was a $65,000,000,000 market in 2003 with a greater than 10% growth rate. Much of that expansion has come from introducing flat liquid crystal display (LCD) screens, but future expansion figures to come from nanotechnology. Several promising nanotechnologies already have been demonstrated, including OLED (organic light emitting diodes)...