Nanotechnology

This is something to do with the ability to manipulate matter at scales of a nanometre (a billionth of a metre). But it’s not new and it is not very clever, either. Public discussion of nanotechnology dates back to 1959, when the physicist Richard Feynman delivered a historic lecture on atomic-scale technologies. In the past decade or two, crazed scientists rebranded chemistry as nanotechnology to make it sexier and more likely to attract funds. The problem is that it is daft to define a technology by a length scale. Would it help, for example, to use the term centitechnology (centi - a hundredth of a metre) to describe bullets, bolts, keys, pills, bees, beetles and marbles, and all the means we have to make them? No. It is bonkers. But that has not stopped the hype. Wild-eyed nanozealots still dream of pinhead-sized factories. Equally wild-eyed nano-Luddites agonise over military nanobots that can take over a body.