Unit 8: Nanotech & Art
The topic for this class this week interrelates nanotechnology and art. Nanotechnology is currently a booming field in science, due to the many scientific and technological advancements that have occurred within the most recent decades.
In the lecture videos, Dr. Gimsewski talks about the history of nanotechnology and how it came to be to its current state. In 1959, a famous and well-respected physicist, Richard Feynman, unknowingly encouraged the advancement of what is now known as nanotechnology in his lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", by suggesting that there is so much room in the atomic scale to make tiny things, which could be a new form of revolutionizing technology. A nanometer is 10^-9 meters, while the diameter of an atom is about 10^-10 meters.Feynman declared that the principles of physics do not forbid the possibility of manipulating things on an atomic scale, something that at the time was deemed to be impossible.
Dr. Gimesewki explains how Richard Feynman challenged the public to play around with this small technology, and offered monetary incentives to those people who could succeed in, for example, reducing the page of a book to 1/25,000 linear scale, readable by an electron microscope, or building a mini motor, no larger than 1/64th the size of a cubic inch. Fascinatingly enough, two people were able to succeed in Feynman's challenges, revolutionizing technology forever. Feynman soon discovered that as we shrink to the nanoscale, due to quantum mechanics, the laws of physics change and things behave in ways that we think are weird, because we do not experience these effects in every day life.
Nanoparticles are being used in labs to create new inventions and are even used in the evolving field of nanomedicine. Quantum dots are used in a wide range of fields, from engineering, chemistry, biotechnology and biomedicine. These quantum dots are particles that range from about 2-10 nanometers that glow a fluorescent rainbow of colors under UV light depending on the size of each particle, creating beautiful images like the one shown.
Overall, nanotechnology is a beautifully complex field of science that has connections to various other fields like physics, engineering and medicine. Nanotechnology is shifting the paradigm between science and art especially in this age of technological advancements. We are at a point where there are only few limitations to what we can do, but in the near future, those limitations could very possibly be overcome. With immense amounts of creative thinking, and the science available to us now, it is exciting to think of how much nanotechnology will keep advancing in our lifetimes
 |
| Scale of an atom. |
In the lecture videos, Dr. Gimsewski talks about the history of nanotechnology and how it came to be to its current state. In 1959, a famous and well-respected physicist, Richard Feynman, unknowingly encouraged the advancement of what is now known as nanotechnology in his lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", by suggesting that there is so much room in the atomic scale to make tiny things, which could be a new form of revolutionizing technology. A nanometer is 10^-9 meters, while the diameter of an atom is about 10^-10 meters.Feynman declared that the principles of physics do not forbid the possibility of manipulating things on an atomic scale, something that at the time was deemed to be impossible.
 |
| Shrunk down version of the page of a book, created by the winner of one of Feynman's challenge, Thomas H. Newman. |
 |
| Quantum dots glow different colors under UV light, depending on the size of each particle. |
Overall, nanotechnology is a beautifully complex field of science that has connections to various other fields like physics, engineering and medicine. Nanotechnology is shifting the paradigm between science and art especially in this age of technological advancements. We are at a point where there are only few limitations to what we can do, but in the near future, those limitations could very possibly be overcome. With immense amounts of creative thinking, and the science available to us now, it is exciting to think of how much nanotechnology will keep advancing in our lifetimes
Sources
Gimsewski, James. “Nanotech Jim pt2.” YouTube, 21 May 2012, youtu.be/HEp6t0v-v9c.
Gimsewski, James. “Nanotech Jim pt3.” YouTube, 21 May 2012, youtu.be/X0HCNiU_108.
Gimzewski, James. “Nanotech Jim pt1.” YouTube, 21 May 2012, youtu.be/q7jM6-iqzzE.
Gimzewski, James. “Nanotech Jim pt4.” YouTube, 21 May 2012, youtu.be/yHCuZetAIhk.
Gimzewski, James. “Nanotech Jim pt5.” YouTube, 21 May 2012, youtu.be/4OWc8nmHJmY.
Gimzewski, James. “Nanotech Jim pt6.” YouTube, 21 May 2012, youtu.be/oKlViSKkPd0?list=PL9DBF43664EAC8BC7.
“IN THE NEWS.” ARCHIVES, archives.caltech.edu/news/feynman-nanotech.html.
Moran, Barbara. “Nanotechnology.” Research What Are Quantum Dots Comments, www.bu.edu/research/articles/quantum-dots-breast-cancer-tumors/.
Hi Asari, I like the paragraph on quantum dots and how they open up an entire realm for nanotechnology. I would be interested to see how quantum dot fabrication is exactly done, and how they can be used to improve imaging technology. For example, it is difficult to resolve images of very small sub-cellular molecules, but perhaps quantum dot conjugation can yield better resolution than current fluorophore-antibody imaging.
ReplyDelete