Part 4 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century
So far in this series of occasional blogs, I’ve covered coupling and communication—two of three “C’s” which together are challenging how science and technology are best used to serve society. Now it’s the time to delve into the third “C”—control.
Because this is a tough subject to cover in one bite, I’m going to split it between three posts. Here, I’ll get the background stuff out of the way. Then, in the following posts in the series, I’ll take a look at why this “C” is so transformative, and some of the more advanced directions control is taking us in.
To kick things off, I want to start big. The image to the right is an artist’s impression of a scheme dreamt up by Roger Angel at the University of Arizona to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth—a possible approach to combating (in part) global warming. It represents the idea of suspending trillions of solar diffusers – fuzzy translucent plates—at the Lagrange point between the earth and the sun, where they can deflect a small amount of the sun’s radiation away from the planet.
If we could achieve this, it would be the largest feat of planetary control ever undertaken.
Just a few years ago, such a scheme would have been pure science fiction. But we are getting to the point where advances in science and technology are bringing mega-engineering projects like this within our grasp. For the first time in human history, we have both the audacity and technology to think about controlling our environment on a planetary scale.
This taking control of things on a grand scale is part of what the third “C” is about. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. Going back to Angel’s solar sunshade, it’s worth asking what it would take to transform this idea from fantasy to reality. In amidst the myriad engineering challenges it represents is the issue of materials—how do you make solar diffusers (or “flyers”) light enough yet robust enough to do their job? The reality is, the materials needed to achieve this simply don’t exist at present.
Which means that for the plan to work, new materials need to be created.
This isn’t a trivial thing to achieve. It’s not as if we are going to discover some fancy new element that can be made into a wonder-material. Rather, the solution is going to lie in how we put small groups of regular atoms—the building blocks of everything we use—together in different ways, to form new and better materials.
And this brings us to the area where increasing control is going to be truly transformative—control over matter at the scale of atoms and molecules—the nanoscale.
But why should controlling matter down at this miniscule level make a difference? The answer lies in what makes stuff work better, and what messes it up.
Most materials we use nowadays are not as good as they could be. They generally function OK, but they could be better. And the reason for this is that down at the nanoscale, they are a mess—atoms aren’t aligned properly, there are gaps in the structure where there shouldn’t be, stuff is present that should not be there, while the stuff that should be there isn’t where it ought to be.
This isn’t surprising. Until relatively recently, we didn’t have the tools or the know-how to engineer stuff down at the atomic level, so we had to make do with rather imperfect materials. This is changing though, and it is changing extremely rapidly.
Eighty years or so ago, scientists began to develop ways of seeing—or at least taking a good stab at visualizing—the structure of materials on an atomic scale. Techniques like electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction opened up a brand new perspective on how stuff is put together. More importantly, these and other tools gave scientists the feedback they needed to start tinkering systematically with materials at the nanoscale.
The age of nanometer-scale control was born.
Over the past couple of decades, near atomic-level control over matter has surged ahead, as growing awareness of its importance has combined with greater incentives for scientists to work across traditional boundaries and huge funding initiatives from government and industry. The result has been rapid progress in engineering materials and products that work—or work better—because their structure has been controlled and manufactured at the nanometer scale. Products as diverse as computers and cosmetics are already benefitting from the added value that comes from nanoscale control. Already there are hundreds of consumer products out there that manufacturers claim do what they do “better” because of nanoscale engineering. These are small fry though compared to some of the applications in the pipeline—smart drugs, new power sources, faster computers, even designer microbes. And the indications are that we are only just beginning to flex our nano-muscles.
The bottom line here is that while science and technology are going to have a highly visible impact on our lives over the next few decades, progress is going to be underpinned in most cases by our increasing control over materials at the invisible nanoscale.
To begin to grasp how working with matter at such a small scale opens up new opportunities, it’s worth focusing on three features of nanoscale control—smallness, strangeness and sophistication. These will be the subjects of the next blog in this series.
Notes
Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford. This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper. But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful. I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.
Previously: Communication: Science and technology in a connected world
Next: Control at the nanoscale: Smallness, strangeness and sophistication