0.7 21st century technology, digital displacement, and the role of  (Page 9/17)

There is another, related, revolution going on at and below the molecular level, in information science and nanotechnology. This revolution capitalizes upon our growing understanding of the once forbidding world of quantum mechanics. This is enabling unexpected, rapid advances in quantum computing, which may endow laptops of year 2025 with more computing power than millions of today’s super computers. The age of computing has been with us for only a quarter century. A new age of quantum computing may have begun in 2007, with the announcement of the world’s first practical quantum computer ( Economist , Feb. 17, 2007).

The biomedical implications of the ongoing marriage of computational sciences and nanotechnology are especially auspicious. In 25 years, powerful, ubiquitous microscopic computers may be used as implants as sensors to monitor our bodily systems, to forecast weather, etc.

Nanotechnology- wet and dry

Nanotechnology has been heavily hyped, with some excessive claims. Still, it seems safe to say in 2014 that never before in history has one technology been so filled with promise, nor so potentially powerful, nor has any technological revolution happened as quickly. At the nanoscale, the boundaries separating traditional scientific and engineering disciplines become blurred to the point of non-existence. Therefore nanotechnology draws on many fields: physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, computer science, engineering and clinical science. Much of nanoscale science and its growing applications are situated on the borderline or below the familiar world of classical physics and the spooky realm of quantum mechanics. To begin to understand the forbidding world of quantum mechanics, one must accept that a sub-atomic particle can be in two places at once: two electrons may establish a kind of telepathic link that transcends space and time. This is called quantum entanglement, long understood to apply in the inorganic world and now perhaps in biological systems.

Research focused on the nanoscale has uncovered new phenomenon that display properties of matter never observed before the turn of the century. Consider that the properties of matter change when taken down to nanosize. If the material in aluminum can is reduced to 25 nanometer size it would become pyrophoric, and explode spontaneously. Another manifestation: quantum dots two nanometers wide have different properties than those six nanometers wide: the former glows in blue light, the latter shines in red.

Nanoscientists and/or nanotechnologists work in either “wet” or “dry” nanofields. The dry, waterless side points toward valuable applications in energy efficiency and materials science, owing to the fact that some forms of carbon nanotubes are far stronger than steel, at one-sixth the weight as conductive as copper by volume and much better by weight. I note in passing that there are some quite unusual applications on the dry side, including Nano-ice, invented in Iceland, appropriately enough, in 2001. The process uses nanoparticles that eliminate the airpockets so detrimental to conventional freezing techniques. As a bonus, Nano-ice uses 90% less refrigerant and 70% less power than today’s ice-making machines. (Reference). The “wet side” (discussed in greater detail below), centers on study of biological systems that exist in a water environment such as human cells. And since everything that goes on in a human cell is nanotechnology, some go so far as to assert that most of 21st century biotechnology is a subset of wet nanotechnology.