• Question: what would the world be like without nanoscience

    Asked by amcdonnell to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I wouldn’t be able to say this to you!

      Computers we use today are based on transistors, which are little electronic switches made on the nanoscale, without nanoscience computers would still be enormous and bulky, and very expensive.

      Just think how different the world would be without computers and the internet.

      Actually, I don’t want to imagine the world without internet!

    • Photo: Christian Wirtz

      Christian Wirtz answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      A few things would change and you’d mostly feel it in the electrical applications!

      All modern computer microchips should actually be called nanochips as they use nanotechnology. I don’t know the exact date, but in the early 2000s they broke through that barrier of getting smaller than 100 nm. Therefore your computer would be stuck on the processor you had in the year 2000 and there wouldn’t be any smartphones.

      A lot of LED lights and lasers use nanotechnology so we’d be back to using simpler versions of those that are more expensive and less efficient.

      Photography would have to take a huge step back! Modern digital cameras wouldn’t work well without the microchips but also the old cameras that used a film had nanotechnology in them (tiny silver chloride particles, about 20 nm in size, were used to record the image).

      There are plenty more things that would take a step back and you’ll find them in all areas of life. Nanotechnology has slowly crept up on us and imagining life without it is quite difficult to us who were born in a time when it was everywhere already.

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      There are three ways to interpret this question.

      1. Is the way that Adam and Chris have already answered it perfectly.

      2. What if nano-things didn’t work the way they do. Well, we wouldn’t be able to take advantage of nano-scale effects like electron tunneling and very high wire resistance. Cling film would stop clinging. We would have no lovely stained glass windows. All these things rely on the special way things interact on the nano-scale.

      3. What if atoms were bigger than they are. What if they were micro-scale? That would be mad. Oh wow, there’s a sci-fi book in that. I have no idea. We’d probably all explode.

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