What is nanotechnology?

Imagine you have shrunk by 1500 million times and you can see atoms, molecules, proteins and cells. Shrunk down to the ‘nanoscale’ , you’d not only see the atoms that everything is made from — you’d actually be able to move them around! Now suppose you started sticking those atoms together in interesting new ways, like tiny LEGO bricks of nature. You could build all kinds of fantastic materials, everything form brand new medicines to ultra-fast computer chips. Nanotechnology has become one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of science and technology today. K Eric Drexler popularised the word ‘nanotechnology’ in the 1980’s, but its theoretical capability was envisioned as early as 1959 by the renowned physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman. Now, you must be wondering, how big is ‘nano’? We live on a scale of metres and kilometres (thousands of metres) , so it’s quite hard for us to imagine a world that’s too small to see. Nano means ‘billionth’, so a nanometre is one billionth of a metre. In other words, the nanoscale is 1000 times smaller than the microscopic scale and a billion (1000 million) times smaller than the world of metres that we live in! Nanotechnology is sometimes referred to as a general-purpose technology. That’s because in its advanced form it will have significant impact on almost all industries and all areas of society. It will offer better built, longer lasting, cleaner, safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, medicine, transportation, agriculture, and industries in general.