Things just got complicated again

Small is beautiful.

In the fourth lecture we were invited to look over the shoulders of mediaeval craft workers as they stitch together a panel on nanotechnology, in a tapestry of technical revolutions.

The story unravelled links between a number of remarkable devices and phenomena on a scale that reaches down from the smallest thing that can be truly seen with light to the very atoms of matter, first imagined by ancient Greeks.

Chemistry has long operated at this atomic level. Indeed school science starts here, simply and naively, and builds up towards the more familiar scale of everyday life.

For generations we have spun our children yarns that are often useless for properly explaining the real world of technology: steel owes its strengths to impurities; glass is considerably weaker than expected until you take account of tiny cracks in its surface, gases do not obey the gas laws; engines never get near their theoretical efficiency.

Creative Commons Image SamHames via Flickr
Engineering in action [Image: Sam Hames under CC-BY-SA licence]

The problem has been that the scale of our real world has been too large to be pure and perfect. It’s ironic therefore that just when engineering is shrinking, to meet the scale where purity and perfection are within reach, the popularity of science and technology in our schools is in decline.

That’s a pity because it looks like things can only get simpler.

There’s more to the nano-world than approaching the ideal's atomic theory. Different things become important. In everyday life ‘density matters’ (because dense things tend to weigh a lot) and most things are just different kinds of ‘stuff’.

The forces between components on the nano-sclale are dominated by electromagnetism - gravity takes a back seat.

Equally importantly the very lumpiness of matter has noticeable effects and the experts speak in terms of ‘quantum mechanics’. Oh dear, what a pity, things just got complicated again!

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