Hello. My name is Jim Gimzewski. I'm a
nanoscientist. I'm also a professor. Ucla
and I work in the California Nano Systems
Institute which is one of the largest
nanotechnology institutes in the world.
Prior to being at UCLA, I actually worked
in IBM's Zurich research laboratory, which
is a very famous lab for nanotechnology
and I started there in'83. So I have
something like 35, 35 years' experience in
nano-tech and today I'd like to present an
introduction to nano-tech. Not only from
the perspective of say, science but from
it's potential to change the world in
terms of social and economic types of
values. And the lecture will really show
it's history, the history in nanotech. How
nature does use nanotechnology. This is
something we've just discovered fairly
recently and various topics like, for
instance, nanotechnology, it's impact on
energy food, agriculture, electronics, in
fact, you name it. Almost every aspect of
science. And technology is somehow
impacted by nanotechnology. It's a very
broad field. Nanotechnology, actually the
word'nano' is, From the Greek for dwarf
but science it refers to a billionth of a
meter. It's a very, very small dimension.
And generally in nano technology some
critical dimension is on the scale of one
to 100 nanometers. That does not mean that
the device or the system is on that scale.
It could be much larger. In fact it could
be you know kilometers but it could
involve this critical dimension of one to
100 nanometers somewhere inside it. And
the word was, originally claimed. By Norio
Taniguchi who was at, at the Tokyo
University of Science. And he used this
term in 1974 at a conference but he was
actually talking about something a little
bit different. He was talking about very,
very thin films deposited on things. And
the type of thin films I'm talking about
are for instance like the coatings that
are used for glare reduction on camera
lenses or glasses. And for those who can
not relate say nano to themselves because
it's so small. We could try to relate
nano. To an atom. This is a chemists view
of an atom. And inside of the atom, there
is things called neutrons and protons. And
then on the outside, we have a kind of
cloud, of which are called the electrons.
So the size of the atom is actually
governed by the size of the electron
cloud. And when we talk about
nanotechnology, for instance when we say a
billionth of a meter, which is a
nanometer. We start to use a scale that's
not just a simple one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight linear scale. We
actually work on a scale which is powers
of ten, so for instance ten. Would be one,
100 would be two. 1000 would be three, and
so on. And if you take one-tenth, it would
be -one. So ten to, to -nine means one
over one with, essentially nine zeros. And
that is the scale. So on this thing, you
can see an example of a logorithmic scale.
And the diameter of an atom. Is much
smaller than a nano. It's about a tenth
approximately of the size of one animator.
So you get ten atoms you know, in a
straight line. So when we think of the
powers of ten scale, we can make a kind of
look, drawing here. Where we go from a
water molecule, which is about a tenth of
an animator. That's ten to the minus one.
[inaudible] sugar molecule, it's about one
nanometer. Antibodies are about ten.
Viruses are about 100. And that would be
more or less nanoscale. And then you go on
to the microscale, which is a bacteria. A
bacteria is approximately a micron, about
a 50th of the diameter of human hair, and
it is ten to the three, or 1,000
nanometers. And cells in your body are
about ten to the four nanometers. And a
tennis ball. Is ten to the eighth, that
means 100,000,000 nanometers. So, that's
the top line. If we look at the bottom
line we see the kind of scales and devices
we deal with in nanotechnology, things
called for instance quantum dots,
nanotubes and so on that I'll describe to
you a little bit later. One good way, and
it's a pretty simple way, is to think of
the thing in scale of thousands. So a
thousand times smaller, a thousand times
smaller, and a thous and times smaller. So
if we take a human body, and say you know
approximately in meters, about two meters.
And then we go down a thousand, we would
come to a scale of an ant. Down a thousand
we would come to the scale of your red
blood cells, for instance and down a
thousand, we would come. To the scale of a
nanometer, things like viruses or for
instance, carbon buckyballs that we'll
talk about. And if we take, a historical
perspective of technology. There are two
approaches. One is where we look at
objects that were made in technology and
we plot them here as a function of time.
This is again one of these scales of a
thousand. And one. Type of device, or
electronic devices. Electronic devices
started quite large. They were on the sca,
the size of your hand, the individual
components. And for a time they became
smaller and smaller. And they're made
essentially by taking a piece of silicone
and etching it and hacking away at it. And
we call that approach, tapped in. And the
tapped in approach has come down to the
scale of an animator. On the other hand if
we consider chemistry, chemists originally
made really simple models. And as time
went on, they were able to make more
complex molecules which made them bigger.
And the types of molecules, many chemists
deal with today is at the scale of
nanometers. So this top-down in technology
and this bottom-up chemical technology has
intersected. And where they intersect is
actually. On the canocritical scale lens
that nature uses. For instance, in you
body, in every cell, you have animated
structures in very complex patterns. The
conceptual origins of nanotechnology are
often attributed to Richard Feynman, even
though Richard Feynman did not actually
use the word "nanotechnology". But in
1959, a caltech gave an interesting talk
called there's plenty of room at the
bottom. Richard Feynman is a very
colourful, colourful physicist. He worked
at the atom bomb. The Manhattan Project.
And he got the Nobel price for his work in
quantum mechanics. But he had a sense of
humor. And in this talk. He suggested
that, on the atomic scale, we have so much
room to make tiny things, that this could
be a new form of technology that could
change the world. And, in fact, he was
completely right, because the
microelectronics revolution, computers and
so on, was just about to take off. A
little bit later, this would be more in
the'80s. Eric Drexler, who was actually a
student of Marv Minsky, the father of
artificial intelligence. Became interested
in nano-technology and he had listened to
Richard Feynman's talks. And he proposed a
different type of vision of nanotechnology
which was a very engineering-based one. So
rather than the stochastic, non
deterministic type of behavior of nature,
nature uses nanotech. He viewed
nanotechnology of the future to be
completely deterministic and mechanical.
So 40, years ago. Fineman delivered a
lecture. And, it's very interesting to
read this article. There's plenty of room
at the boardroom. One of his many, many
famous quotes was the principle of physics
as far as I can see, do not speak against
the possibility of maneuvering things atom
by atom. Now this at the time, seemed
impossible. How could one possibly
consider even moving an atom or touching
an atom? And he also said put the atoms
down where the chemist says and so you
make the substance. And so he was talking
in this about the basic idea in
nanotechnology, that we could manipulate
things on an atomic scale. And one of the
challenges he made at that time was to
write 25,000 pages of the Encyclopedia
Britannica on a pinhead. Now, if you do
the calculations and you had something the
size of an animator, that would be the
information bit if you like. You can, you
find on a pinhead you can write actually
260,000,000 pages of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. So there is plenty of room at
the bottom. So that you imagine volumes
and volumes of these books being on a
pinhead. Another prize he offered was to
make a tiny electric motor which was.4
millimeters in each dimension. So you
imagine something that's much thinn er
than you know, your nail, is the thickness
of your nail. And less than a year later
The first prize was claimed, and in 1985
the second prize was claimed. So, I think
that surprised them that, you know, these
things could be actually done, because he
was more a theoretician than
experimentalist. Feynman realized also,
and some things that people fail to
realize later. And that was, as we make
things on the nano scale, the laws of
physics change. So what we call classical
mechanics as developed by Issac Newton
changes into a quantum mechanical realm.
And the rules of quantum mechanics
dominate. And this is an effect we can use
in, in nanotechnology, the quantum effect.
Secondly things like surface tension for
instance water drops on a surface balls up
whereas in a cup it appears to be flat.
Thermal energy [inaudible] small particles
dominates over the gravity, the pull of
gravity. For instance, [inaudible]
particles in milk. It doesn't settle.
That's due to their [inaudible]. So we
have new phenomena that dominate on the
nanoscale and the behaviour of nanoscale
objects can be used to create very new
effects like new forms of color, new types
of chemistry, all sorts of things.
Drexala's vision on the other hand, was
this engineering vision and his book which
was popular was called Engines of Creation
the coming of a new era in technology. And
this type of approach, engineering
approach reduced then to the level of
mechanical gearing. And what you see in
this animation here is a, a dragsler-like,
bearing. And so the idea is you take a
[inaudible] you know shrink it down to the
size of a molecule and there you've got
it. However. Drexler and Ralph Merkle kept
going. Ralph Merkle and, was a colleague
of Drexler and they formed an organization
called Foresight. And in that organization
they came up with different ideas. One was
the idea of an assembler, like the Ford
assembly plant on the molecular scale. And
what you see on the last. Here's an, an
example of an assembler schematic, which
has arms that pick up mole cules and put
the molecules down where you want them.
And the idea was this thing is like a
microwave and you could put dirt in it,
and essentially reassemble the atoms. Into
a hamburger. And now the law of physics is
not necessarily against that, I mean cows
do that. They, you have dirt, you have
grass, you have cows, you have hamburgers.
But this type of approach if you think
about it, if you have to position each
molecule in the hamburger one by one,
would essentially take billions and
billions of years. So it's not very
practical. And the last, it continued with
that approach. However, there was a, a
debate. And that debate was between,
Smalley and Dregson. Now, Smalley. Richard
Smalley was one of the, co-inventors or
co-discoverers of the Buckyball. A new
form of carbine. A ball shaped like a
soccerball, a soccerball in fact, which
was exactly about one nanometer in
diameter. And Drexler could not stand,
Smalley and Smalley could not stand
Drexler. And they had a debat and it was
published in Chemical Engineering News.
There were also some articles in Science.
And basically Smalley. Said that Drexler's
vision was ridiculous, and at this point
Drexler stopped talking about
nanotechnology and retreated back from the
