Nanotechnology

Abstract

Nanotechnology is widely considered to constitute the basis of the next technological revolution, following on from the first Industrial Revolution, which began around 1750 with the introduction of the steam engine and steelmaking (and which parallelled, or perhaps caused, upheavals in land ownership and agriculture practice). The Industrial Revolution constituted as profound a change in society and civilization as the earlier Stone, Bronze and Iron revolutions, each of which ushered in a distinctly new age in the history of human civilization. A second Industrial Revolution began around the end of the 19th century with the introduction of electricity on an industrial scale (and which paved the way for other innovations such as wireless communication), and most recently we have had the Information Revolution, characterized by the widespread introduction of computing devices and the internet. Insofar as the further development of very large-scale integrated circuits used for information processing depends on reducing the sizes of the individual circuit components down to the nanoscale (i.e., a few tens of nanometres), the Information Revolution has now become the Nano Revolution—just as steam engines powered dynamos for the industrial generation of electricity. But, nanotechnology brings its own distinctive challenges, notably: (i) handling matter at the atomic scale (which is what nanotechnology is all about—a synonym is “atomically precise engineering”) means that qualitatively different behaviour needs to be taken into account; and (ii) in order for atomically precisely engineered objects to be useful for humans, they need to be somehow multiplied, which introduces the problem of handling vast numbers of entities