{"id":106470,"date":"2020-05-03T16:26:58","date_gmt":"2020-05-03T23:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/theres-plenty-more-room-at-the-bottom-beyond-nanotech-to-femtotech"},"modified":"2020-05-03T16:26:58","modified_gmt":"2020-05-03T23:26:58","slug":"theres-plenty-more-room-at-the-bottom-beyond-nanotech-to-femtotech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/theres-plenty-more-room-at-the-bottom-beyond-nanotech-to-femtotech","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s Plenty More Room at the Bottom: Beyond Nanotech to Femtotech"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it\u2019s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. For example, while writing this article, I happened to receive an email advertisement for the \u201cSecond World Conference on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery<\/a>,\u201d in Kerala, India. It wasn\u2019t so long ago that nanomedicine<\/a> seemed merely a flicker in the eyes of Robert Freitas and a few other visionaries!<\/p>\n

But nano is not as small as the world goes. A nanometer is 10\u22129<\/sup> meters \u2013 the scale of atoms and molecules. A water molecule is a bit less than one nanometer long, and a germ is around a thousand nanometers across. On the other hand, a proton has a diameter of a couple femtometers \u2013 where a femtometer, at 10\u221215<\/sup> meters, makes a nanometer seem positively gargantuan. Now that the viability of nanotech is widely accepted (in spite of some ongoing heated debates about the details), it\u2019s time to ask: what about femtotech? Picotech or other technologies at the scales between nano and femto seem relatively uninteresting, because we don\u2019t know any basic constituents of matter that exist at those scales. But femtotech, based on engineering structures from subatomic particles, makes perfect conceptual sense, though it\u2019s certainly difficult given current technology.<\/p>\n

The nanotech field was arguably launched by Richard Feynman\u2019s 1959 talk \u201cThere\u2019s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.\u201d As Feynman wrote there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it\u2019s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. For example, while writing this article, I happened to receive an email advertisement for the \u201cSecond World Conference on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery,\u201d in Kerala, India. It wasn\u2019t so long ago that nanomedicine seemed merely a flicker in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,38,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-engineering","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}