I remember I had started to put on a podcast. Maybe it will help keep my focus on fixing this tablet instead of spending so much time on fantasies.

I put my earbuds in and tell the phone to play whatever is next on my list. I ignore the opening commercial and the opening music before my draw drops a bit: Today’s topic is nanotechnology. It seems like a fortuitous coincidence. Isn’t this guy normally all about software development?

“...she's working on her Ph.D. in nanotechnology and all things small…”

So she’s an expert. My curiosity is piqued.

“I noticed there is some sort of controversy, and you’ve been challenged online about nanotechnology not actually being a thing. I’ve searched the web, and it definitely comes up in the results as a thing. What’s going on there?” the host inquired.

“An awful lot of research projects are going to have to change their names if it isn’t actually a thing,” the guest laughed. “I think whatever controversy there is has arisen more out of terminology than whether the field exists or not.”

“As one scientist said recently, ‘The term is used to get grant funding, a lot of grant funding,’ and those kinds of compromises have muddied an already difficult field,” she finished.

I couldn’t agree more.

As I try to re-focus on the electronics at hand, I tune out a bit as the discussion moves on to what gold looks like as suspended nanoparticles instead of the macro-substance with which we are all familiar. Surprise! It doesn’t look gold-colored at all. To be fair, most software developers listening would have no idea it wouldn’t still look like gold.

So far, she’s only talking about nanoparticles. It irks me this is what ‘scientists’ believe the field of nanotechnology to be about. The very notion ignores the ‘technology’ part of the word entirely. Nanoparticles are merely a subset of nanomaterials research, which usually involves nothing ‘nano’ until the final product, and even then, not always.

“In science fiction, we often see stories where these nano-things go wild and reproduce themselves until there is nothing left. How much danger are we in from something similar?” asked the host. Everyone just has to go there: The infamous ‘gray goo’ scenario.

“That idea is based on the concept of being able to create tiny robots who can, in turn, create more tiny robots,” our guest begins. “Most people think these will look like transformers or droids, but just shrunk into these tiny, tiny scales.”

A chuckle escapes me as the visual of Optimus riding a blood cell pops into my brain. I am curious how she’ll continue.

“What really happens is more like a collection of molecules working more or less together. In 2016 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists who had created the first molecular motor. While they functioned like motors after a fashion, they didn’t look anything like what a typical person would consider a motor,” she lectured.

This is about the point where each researcher shows their roots. The chemists talk about chemicals, the bio-chemists talk about organics, the physicists talk about electron microscopes. Almost no one seems to get it.

We’re talking about machines here. You need to know about how all those mediums affect each other and interact, but it must be approached as if you are an engineer. If we ever want to get anywhere, that is.

It turns out she’s a cancer researcher, so her primary nano-focus is on nanoparticles. It makes sense; the nanoparticles of specific elements can be excited by external forces to damage just the cells to have scooped them up. Tailoring the particle surfaces to be gobbled by cancerous cells allows the cancer to be killed without harming the patient.

Much better than chemotherapy, if it works.

“...the conversion of energy is never perfect, which applies to nanobots as well…” she continued. She’s giving what I feel like is a valid argument, but not really on a practical level. I think she is sensible and knows her field, but her field is nanoparticles, not nanotechnology.

The argument I like the best is the one about a car. Saying any nanobot can go wild and consume the planet is about the same as saying if you leave your car in a forest it will learn to forage for its fuel so it can survive in the wild. We wouldn’t expect a space shuttle to cruise to the bottom of the ocean with equal ease, so why expect our machines to behave completely differently at random?

Mostly I think it’s because of invisibility. In our society, if you can’t see it, you can’t trust it. It probably came about from the cold war, if it wasn’t in place sooner. We learned to fear radiation because radiation killed you without seeing it coming. Fearing the word ‘nuclear,’ whether they can pronounce it or not, has impaired rational thought and replaced it with: Nuclear bad. Between fear and a desire to produce plutonium for bombs, our efforts at clean power from anything related to radioactive isotopes have been practically doomed.

There I go; building steam for the thorium rant again.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Uh-oh. I hate it when I drop these tiny screws. It’s going to take a magnet to find it now.

“...if you want to create a life form, but using inorganic materials like metals, you’re going to have even more problems than currently living organisms.” I caught the guest saying. While technically true, I think, it seems like she is off base and speaking out of her expert zone.

Of course, I could be wrong.

There’s the screw! Whew. It’s hard enough to repair these things as is without losing a screw. Or leaving one loose. I can imagine the groans I would get from saying that one out loud. I’m so funny.

Where was I?

Ah, yes: Nanotechnology.

One of my absolute favorites.

Something like twenty years ago, I was following the nanotech news fanatically. Nearly every week amazing announcements were hitting the news. I quickly learned it took a certain level of geekdom to actually consider such news items as anything but in the “Who cares?” category.

Still, I was excited. I could extrapolate the advancements and see an amazing future fast approaching. Various predictions by many “experts” of the time mostly agreed the time of nanotech was not an “if,” but rather a “When?” It seemed the prime variable was how much effort and money was put into research right then, to produce progress later. Had we done so with gusto, we would be seeing amazing results by now.

Then the term was absconded and corrupted.

Since it was ‘The Next Big Thing,’ everyone and their sixth cousin wanted in on the action. To me, nanotechnology has always meant machines built at the molecular scale. To the world at large, it was ‘tiny stuff that does magic.’ To the corporations it came to mean, ‘anything with a final product measured in a thousand nanometers or less.’ It is a travesty.

It became one of my rant triggers, like nuclear energy. Many things which would once have used the term micro-something now started calling themselves nano-somethings. No finesse, no nano-scale devices or mechanisms, just some bulk material smashed into barely nano-sized pieces. It would be kind of like wanting a remote camera drone for your birthday and getting a field of house-sized boulders instead. Practically the same, right?

I let out a huff of exasperated air. Just thinking about it torques me in ways I find difficult to explain.

The drone versus boulder analogy seems like a pretty good example, though. I wonder if I can expand on it, or even do better?

Oh! How about using lego-like blocks? If a hydrogen atom were the equivalent of a one-pip block, then blocks of various sizes are not a horrible approximation of atoms. Put a few blocks together and you have molecules. This could work.

I grab the phone to do some image searching, all thoughts of the poor iPad on the table before me cast aside for now. The podcast is already wrapping up, which is good, since I’m done with it.

So, taking the hydrogen as a 1x1 block, it’s 37 picometres, while the big, old cesium is 265 picometres, which makes it a 7x7 block, roughly. Double-checking more internet images I find, yes, there are some absolutely amazing machines out there made of these kinds of blocks. Just a one-meter cube is more than enough to build some phenomenal mechanisms.

So, the internet tells me a current standard fourteen-nanometer transistor is about 67 silicon atoms wide. Those would be roughly 3x3 blocks each, so a single transistor would have its smallest features measure about 1.6 meters in block scale. That’s getting up to the height of typical people! That’s a lot of blocks just to make the smallest feature on the whole chip! If 14 nanometers equals 160 centimeters, that’s close enough to fudge and just say 1 nanometer is 10 centimeters in block scale for estimating. Or better yet, every nanometer converts to ten actual 1x1 plastic blocks of 8 millimeters each. Doing the math backward, 67 3x3 silicon blocks measure about 1.6 meters. That will work.

A few searching clicks later, I find a video of a silicon chip zoom, from macro to nano levels. A pause and measure moment shows it is about a three-millimeter chip. Continuing the zoom, the resemblance to a well-planned city is uncanny. Ah! There’s an excellent frame showing the main street-like pathways measure a single micron wide; one thousand nanometers. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Suddenly, I feel cheated. The video doesn’t continue to the next level of zoom! It just says transistors are 20 nanometers in size and ends. That’s not quite what I’m looking for, and it doesn’t sound quite right, either.

Then I find information on more modern chips. If I am reading correctly, a 10 nanometer process produces a logic gate of 48 nanometers by 36 nanometers. Converting to plastic blocks, they take up 3.8 meters by 2.8 meters, almost the size of a small car.

At a thousand nanometers to a micron, and a thousand microns to a millimeter, that three-millimeter chip in blocks would be a city of 240 kilometers per side. That’s about the size of the southern tip of California. Much bigger than the small city size I was guessing.

The scale difference is truly mind-boggling. If a neat machine could fit in a box I could carry in my arms, then a whole block-made computer might be the size of a house. The old proposition of a 200-nanometer size for a standard nanoblock is just about the right size. In this new, relatable plastic block scale, it would be a cube of sixteen meters per side. Imagining all the complexity that could be built into each one is daunting. A city’s worth of house-sized mechanical computers could fit in less than a one-millimeter chip.

THIS is why dropping house-sized rocks in a field and calling it nanotech steams me so.

I’ve been nursing a pet conspiracy theory about all this confusion for a while now. It involves where I feel the technology should really be by now, where it would be if we had put the time and effort and money into it the concept deserves. Tellina rolls her eyes when I get to going too much on the topic. She concedes I have points, but honestly, why am I putting so much effort into this? Wouldn’t doing the dishes be more productive?

I must concede to how ‘right’ she is. Still, if some rich philanthropist had decided to put their fortune into a gamble which could change the world, why would a Manhattan Project-scale effort be such a stretch of the imagination? I’ve looked into what they did in World War II. It is not unreasonable for someone who could buy Lanai or eliminate malaria to instead focus on a secret project to bring nanotechnology to the world. There are no breadcrumbs I can find to indicate anyone has actually put any effort into such a massive undertaking, but isn’t that the point of keeping it secret?

Dang it. I need to get this iPad repaired, especially since I am only now remembering Tellina and her parents are leaving early in the morning for the weekend. It would be a nice surprise to be able to give it to her tonight. I love to give her reasons to smile. Focus, dang it!