Small wonders
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3494722
Dec 29th 2004
From The Economist print edition
Nanotechnology will give humans greater control of matter at tiny
scales. That is a good thing, says Natasha Loder (interviewed here)
ATOMS are the fundamental building blocks of matter, which means they
are very small indeed. The world at the scale of atoms and molecules is
difficult to describe and hard to imagine. It is so odd that it even
has its own special branch of physics, called quantum mechanics, to
explain the strange things that happen there. If you were to throw a
tennis ball against a brick wall, you might be surprised if the ball
passed cleanly through the wall and sailed out on the other side. Yet
this is the kind of thing that happens at the quantum scale. At very
small scales, the properties of a material, such as colour, magnetism
and the ability to conduct electricity, also change in unexpected ways.
Nanotechnology
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