Foreward: Understanding Nanotechnology. Michael L. Roukes For ...

Foreward: Understanding Nanotechnology.
Michael L. Roukes
For every biological entity-from the smallest virus or bacterium to the largest of
mammals-there exists a genome containing the information that specifies a complete
blueprint for that species. These are information packages of almost inconceivable
complexity, encoded in molecular detail. They, in turn, provide the instructions enabling
cellular machinery to assemble, with atomic precision, the variety of proteins endowing
biological entities with their viability, which is manifested in a myriad of forms. Stepping
back from the perspective of things molecular to those global – it is obvious that within
our biosphere at each and every moment, this kind of “mass production with atomic
specificity” is ongoing with astronomical multiplicity. This nature’s awe-inspiring
nanotechnology; her machinery is already and always in motion. From my perspective as
a nanoscientist over the pat two decades, this sets (what seems today) almost an
unattainable challenge for us. Yet, we press on in our labs undaunted. Collectively
pursuing what is the overarching goal in our field-namely, engineering, assembly, then
mass production, of matter and machines with atomic precision.
But if truth be told-nanotechnology, apart from nature’s realization, is still at present
largely a vision for the future. But here vision and imagination are all important; in fact,
there is ample room for scientific visionaries to coexist symbiotically with the futurists
who fascinate, and sometimes pro, us with exotic dreams of worlds to come. Ultimately
however, all of our fanciful notions must be subjected to the refinement and distillation of
true laboratory science. These shortcuts generally do not exist; concrete bridges to new
understanding must always emerge from a base of reproducible and verifiable scientific
fact. Ultimately, progress in science and engineering hinges upon connections that carry
us from the knowledge of today to the breakthroughs of tomorrow. Historically such
advances have always been hard won. For nanotechnology, a field of immense
complexity, it is clear that these will come only through a massive and collective
investment of effort over the next few decades involving many scientists and institutions.
In other words, realizing nanotechnology isn’t a fad, it’s a scientific voyage, and
enthusiasm for what’s ahead is key!
Although nanotechnology is an enterprise of the future, nanoscience is very much a
robust field today. Advances are emerging almost daily from both academic and
corporate laboratories worldwide. Collectively, This body of work is laying a solid
foundation for future nanotechnology. In fact, over the past two decades we have learned
much from science at the mesoscale, at a dimensions between the atomic realm and those
of the everyday “macroworld”. Mesoscopic science has repeatedly demonstrated
spectacular ways in which our intuition and, more importantly, conventional approaches
to extrapolative prediction, can fail as we shrink the sizes of structures to the realm at
which their underlying physics is determined.
What often emerge at the mesoscale are phenomena that involve the coherent or
collective interactions amongst the fundamental constituents – be they electrons, atoms,
or molecules. Despite being “nanoscopic” (that is, of nanometer dimension), mesoscopic

structures that are too large, in general, to allow easy theoretical modeling using
conventional approaches of quantum physics or chemistry. So this is indeed a tricky
realm, where unexpected and wonderful new properties emerge – and the elucidation of
such properties represent the “front lines” of some of today’s most exciting nanoscience.
Nobel laureate and Caltech physics professor Richard P. Feynman clearly anticipated
these forefronts in 1959, in his legendary speech “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” [1].
“This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much of the
fundamental physics in the sense of, ‘What are the strange particles?’. But it is more like
solid state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of the great interest about the
strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most
important is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications.”
It is precisely upon such complex systems that nanotechnology will be built - nanoscale
systems that are too large to be considered molecules, but not yet large enough to
transcend the seemingly exotic mesoscopic world back to the ordinary realm of the
macroscopic. In 1972, another Nobel physicist, Phillip W. Anderson, elegantly
articulated the concept of “emergent” properties in complex systems in his seminal article
entitled “More is different” [2].
“The behavior of large and complex aggregations of elementary particles, it turns out, is
not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few
particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the
understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in
nature as any other”
So as we survey the impressive recent advances of naonscience (such as outlined in this
volume) it begins to become clear that much, if not most, still remains to be learned.
From this knowledge will emerge the rules that future nanoengineers will routinely
employ to realize their atomically precise technology. Meanwhile, our research today on
systems at the nanoscale is a crucible within which traditionally disparate disciplines –
from the life sciences, to quantum physics, to semiconductor device engineering – are
melding to form a new science. At this exciting convergence of fields we are
collaboratively beginning to teach ourselves new ways to thing about – and to engineer –
matter at ultrasmall dimensions.
[1] A transcript is available at www.its.caltech.edu/~feynman
[2] P. W. Anderson, Science 177, 393 (1972).