X-Message-Number: 20850
From: 
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 06:24:31 EST
Subject: I see no nanotech

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Nanotech is the buzz word when talking about possible revival. Some go on 
even to say that there is nearly day to day progress in that domain. For my 
part, outside mere marketing hipe, I see no nanotech in the real world. It is 
nothing more than sect faith with a pinch of technological flavor.

Look at the facts:

Microelectronics is a technology built on micro-lithography. The same basic 
tools can be used to carve micron-sized mechanical parts and there is no 
reasons to think that complex devices can't be done along this way. So, yes,  
there are many realizations with that technology. We can hope for better DNA 
sequencers, many chemical/biological analyser interface with electronics 
devices, better flat screen TV, may be new high density computer memory, and 
so on. This is all about quantitative progress and in this general frame, 
microtech has this place.

This is microtech, not nanotech, the difference in scale in a factor of one 
thousand, but more, the space are differents. Microtech works in euclidean, 
classical space, nanotech would work in quantum domain, just the thing most 
readers of cryonet don't want to ear about. Some, such Thomas Donaldson if I 
have well understood his viewpoint see molecular biology as nanotech. So, if 
nanotech is simply a new market label for a old thing, well it exist. But it 
is simply a new way to market old products, so don't hope from it anything 
out of what the old thing was able to do. 19th century chemistry was nanotech 
along that way...

What would be true nanotech? 

One nanometer is the diameter of 6 - 8 atoms, so it is quantum mechanics at 
molecular level. Note that life is chemistry with small molecules and special 
shape catalysis, not really natural occuring nanotech. A real nanodevice 
would for example store and process informations in interferences of high n 
quantum numbers, use Boze-Einstein condensate at nano scale, use entangled 
atoms/particles and squeezed quantum states,... These are the basic tools of 
nanotech devices. None has beenworked out at this scale, even is a single 
laboratory in the world. The best that has been done, is an interference 
patern in one atom producing the sigle IBM.

Micro-tech: yes. Biochemistry: yes. Plain chemistry: yes. Nanotech: not yet.

Yvan Bozzonetti.

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