technology having enormous beneficial outcomes for mankind are extremely great.
To help you grasp the concept of how small a nanometer is, understand this.
The distance from your nose to your hand is about a meter. A thousandth of that is a millimetre. And a thousandth of a millimeter is a micron. And finally, a thousandth of a micron is 1 nanometer(nm). It is a billionth of a meter, or about 1/100 000 the width of a human hair.
What we have to clear up is, Nanotechnology does not exist yet. Even though you will be hearing and seeing a lot of 'nanotechnology' in the market place, it is not really nanotechnology, in the true sense. To clarify the previous statement, consider the below two definitions.
Nanotechnology- It is the ability to create and manipulate at the atomic level. The ability to place and build atom by atom. (conceptual)
Nanoscale Bulk Technology- Nanoscale is the size, less than a micron (1000 nm), and bulk meaning moving many atoms at a single time. (reality)
This should help you understand the concepts better.
As mentioned, it was Dr Drexler, considered the father of nanotechnology, who coined the term. But he certainly was not the first person to think that it is possible to build up from the atomic level. Drexler was inspired by the late Richard Feynman, a physicist, who in 1959 gave a lecture on miniaturisation. In Drexler's books, he describes how products of the future will be built from the bottom up, atom by atom. They will be built my molecular assemblers, molecular sized machines that can manipulate atoms.
He described a mechanical, as opposed to a chemical, process of bonding atoms, he called this the mechanical phase.
Depending on which way you look at it, nanotechnology could currently be a $100 billion or a $1 billion business.
Currently we do not have the means yet to manipulate individual atom, but what we can do is manipulate bunches of atoms, this we called nanosc...