by Mark Ollig
“Why
cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the
head of a pin?”
You
may think this is a recently asked question, when in fact, it was asked in
1959.
This
question was proposed by Richard Feynman, a physicist, who was speaking at the
American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology
(CalTech).
In
his address, he went on to describe a process scientists would conceivably
someday use to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules.
It
wasn’t until 1974 when the term “nanotechnology” would first be coined by Norio
Taniguchi, a Tokyo science university professor, but nanotechnology, is what
Feynman was accurately discussing.
So,
exactly how small are we talking here?
The
word “nano” means one-billionth, in scientific expressions.
In
making some comparisons to understand how small a scale nanotechnology works
on, yours truly went out and found a few examples.
A
human hair is measured across at about 50,000 to 100,000 nanometers.
The
thickness of a sheet of newspaper is about 100,000 nanometers.
The
length of an inch equals 25,400,000 nanometers.
Comparatively,
if a marble were the size of a nanometer, then one meter (three feet) would
equal the size of the Earth.
Our
fingernails grow at a rate of one nanometer every second.
Getting
back to Feynman’s 1959 question; he reasoned if the head of a pin is 1/16 inch
across, and we magnified it by 25,000 diameters, we would then have an area
equal to the space needed to fit all the pages of the Encylopaedia Britannica
onto.
He
then surmised what remained was the method needed to reduce in size all the
printed words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica – by a factor of 25,000.
His
next question was, “How do we write small?”
Feynman
admitted the technique needed was not available in 1959; however, he did
attempt to explain one method which might be used.
He
said the lenses of an electron microscope could be reversed so it would
demagnify, instead of magnify.
A
stream of electrically charged electron particles, or ions would be transmitted
through this demagnification and focused on a very small location on the pin
head. Feynman stated this method would be similar to how they were able to
write words on a television, via a cathode-ray (vacuum tube containing an
electron gun) oscilloscope.
“I
am not inventing antigravity, which is possible someday, only if the laws are
not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we
think; we are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it,”
Feynman said during his speech.
Feynman
made a futuristic prediction in 1959.
He
used the example of the librarian at Caltech. The librarian needs to go from
one building to another in order to keep track of some 120,000 volumes of
books, which he said “are stacked from the floor to the ceiling.”
Feynman
said in 10 years, this information “can be kept on just one library card.”
Albeit
not shrunk onto a single library card, he was accurate about how we would use
technology to reduce in size large amounts of information, and place it onto a
very small area.
By
1969, IBM had developed an 8-inch memory disk or “flexible disk” coated with a
magnetic material; we call it a floppy disk. It had a storage capacity of 80
kilobytes, which could hold about 40 typed pages of information, after having
been converted into binary code.
This
led to the transference of data stored on paper punched cards to floppy disks
in many companies, and, I imagine, in colleges like CalTech, as well.
It
wasn’t until 1986, that IBM developed the 3-1/2-inch floppy disk (or diskette)
with 1.44 megabytes of storage capacity.
Today,
scientists using the latest nanomaterials and nanotechnology are improving
efficiencies of many computing-related devices, including computer memory.
Substance’s
like graphene and quantum dots particles, which are influenced by means of nanotechnology,
are being used in extremely small computers and communication devices.
The
12th International Nanotechnology Exhibition and Conference, better known as
Nanotech 2013, took place recently in Tokyo, Japan.
It
is known as the world’s largest nanotech fair.
Nanotech
2013 presented cutting-edge nanotechnology and the latest in nanomaterials.
More
than 1,000 exhibitors representing 600 companies, along with about 60,000
people from more than 20 countries, attended this event.
A
variety of nano-related topics were covered, including healthcare and medical
treatments using nanobio-technology.
Exhibits
presented nanotechnologies used for creating “green renewable” products. These
will be used commercially for the development of renewable raw materials for
product manufacturing.
Safer
green-related solvents and chemical products for commercial and home use are
currently being made using nanotechnology.
Thinner,
and more efficient photovoltaic cells used in solar panels, are also now
created using nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology
is currently shaping how the smallest of nanoparticles can be re-organized and
arranged into new materials and devices being used today, and in the future.
For
more information, check out the National Nanotechnology Initiative website
located at http://www.nano.gov.
