Chaos, Solitons & Fractals Volume 30, Issue 4, November 2006, Pages 769–773 Cover image Nanotechnology for the developing world M. Saladin El Naschie Show more doi:10.1016/j.chaos.2006.04.037 Get rights and content Abstract The letter discusses the indispensable importance of Nanotechnology for the scientific and economical revival of the developing world. Similar to the nuclear age, and maybe far more so, the nanoage will be something of a Hemingway line of demarcation between the have and the have nots. 1. Introduction Part of this short letter is a personal commentary on what is proposed. Taking this commentary out will not affect the content regarding Nanotechnology in the developing world. It is however essential that the reader knows where the author is coming from and the strong feeling he has regarding certain issues which he deems to be fundamental. The author follows many scientists and thinkers who believe scientific research to be directly linked to national security. This sentiment is expressed in two articles published in 1998 [1] and [2]. The second was reported in the Arabic newspaper “Al Hayat” after a conference which the author helped to organize in the University of Cairo. The first article was published in English in the scientific journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. 1.1. What is nanotechnology? The naive and direct answer to the frequently posed question what exactly is Nanotechnology is to say that it is a technology concerning processes which are relevant to physics, chemistry and biology taking place at a length scale of one divided by 100 million of a metre [3]. Maybe a little bit more enlightening although equally naive is to say that nanotechnology is the art of producing little devices and machines, somewhat at the molecular scale [4] and [5]. However the scientific definition which I admit may be slightly involved for a non-specialized person, is to say that nanotechnology is a technology applied in the grey area between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. Classical mechanics is the mechanics governing the motion of all the objects we can see with our naked eye [3] and [4]. This is a mechanics which obeys deterministic laws and which we can control to a very far extent. We know when an aeroplane or a car will arrive at its destination when we know when they started their journey and their speed. The same applies to a stone or a shell fired by a canon. When we know the forces acting on the shell or the stone then we know exactly where it will land. This is what we learned from Galileo and Newton. By contrast, quantum mechanics which is the mechanics controlling the motion of things like the electron, the proton, the neutron and the like is completely probabilistic. We know nothing about the motion of the electron except that there is a probability that the electron may be here or there. Even crazier than this, if we know the exact location of an electron, it is impossible to know its speed, and if we know the exact speed of the electron it is impossible to know its exact location. Such a relationship is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The question then which poses itself is when does a classical object like a stone change its nature to a quantum object like an electron. Somewhere between these two scales these changes happen, but this does not happen suddenly. There is a grey area between these two scales which is neither classical nor quantum. Theoretical physicists call it the mesoscopic system [6]. This is what is called by non-physicists the nanoworld. A nanosystem is therefore something which is sufficiently small that we could not see with our naked eye and not even with an ordinary microscope [6]. However it is sufficiently larger than an electron so that we can control it in principle if we have a very fine tool to manipulate the system. It was a great achievement of a young German, Gerd Bennig to invent a microscope which is so refined that he could see atoms with his eyes for the first time in history. Bennig and Rohrer received the Nobel Prize for Physics for that invention [4]. Further development of this microscope made it possible to use it to move and transport atoms at our own will, thus forming new materials which do not exist naturally in our planet [3]. This may have been the starting point of what we call today Nanotechnology, but nanotechnology existed also much earlier although the word was not invented yet. For instance, all genetically manipulated agriculture products are forms of nanotechnology. The way of treating cancer with radiation and chemotherapy is a very primitive form of nanotechnology applied in medicine. We will come to all that later on, but maybe I should approach nanotechnology from another point of view, namely that of industrial production. So far the majority of our industrial products could be labelled bulk industry or bulk production. To produce a wooden chair, we take a large trunk of a tree and cut it down to smaller sizes and fit these pieces together until we produce a chair. However nature operates in a very different way. To produce the trunk of a tree, nature grows a tree. It starts with a very small seed. This seed has all the information needed to grow a tree. In nanotechnology, we are trying partially to imitate nature and to build things starting with atoms. So we have moved now from the traditional bulk industry which is wasteful and accompanied by a great deal of pollution to the atomic scale industry which we call nanotechnology [3], [4] and [5]. 1.2. Why is nanotechnology important? Now we can move to the next point, namely why nanotechnology is important. In fact we can make a leap and ask why nanotechnology is important for the developing world, particularly for very rich but paradoxically still developing countries. Of course I can answer this in the normal logical way, when the circumstances are normal and logical. However, many parts of the developing world are facing incredible situations. The most advanced, most powerful country on our planet, the United States of America has invested billions of dollars in nanotechnology. The Clinton-Nanotechnology-Initiative goes back to the end of last century and was announced officially in 2000. Europe has in the meantime an enormously large nanotechnology program, billions of Euros worth and nanotechnology centres are mushrooming everywhere. Both, India and of course the miraculous People’s Republic of China are investing generously in nanotechnology. China has an excellent nanotechnology textile industry already. Not only that, but a key player on the international scene is Israel, which in many aspects, is admirably leading the world in nanotechnology. Unfortunately that is where things nearly end. Poor and rich developing countries are lagging hopelessly behind. However this is still not the whole story. The crucial importance of the above comes from the very nature of nanotechnology. This technology requires a relatively small investment and the way from research results to marketing is relatively short. In addition government expenditure at least in the United States is matched almost dollar by dollar by the private sector. Most companies in the USA have an R & D Departments working on nanotechnology. There are also a huge number of small companies in Israel, the United States, Europe, China and India working on nanotechnology related products. This alone shows us that the whole scientifically aware and technologically advanced world considers nanotechnology to be the future. Most thinkers and scientists working on nanotechnology predict that nano will change our world in the next 100 years more than all the changes that we have seen in the last half a millennium. Countries as large as the United States and as small as Israel think nano is the future. Countries with the highest standard of living, such as Europe and countries with the weakest per capita income like India think that nano is the future and that investing in nano is indispensable. In such circumstances how could it be possible that other developing countries, like say my country, Egypt should be an exception? The history of technology in general is a history of competition even between friendly neighbours. It is enormously important to see what your neighbours and competitors are doing. They are doing nanotechnology on a large scale. For one to say that we do not care what our neighbours are doing in nano or any other industrial field, is such an ignorant utterance which invites even the mildest of people to get impatient and even angry. No one could possibly be so absent minded or conceited or presumptuous to think that he lives in vacuum, unless this vacuum is in the head which produces such arrogance. It is for the writer a truly lamentable situation that many of the countries in the developing world have allowed themselves to slip away in many directions, but missing the nanotechnology age could be their most fatal mistake. Nanotechnology is important because it is relatively cheap, relatively safe, relatively clean and the financial rewards are relatively very high. It is a technology and science melange oriented towards applications [4], [5] and [6]. The author works for instance with all his heart and brain in high energy unification physics [7]. This is very prestigious research. It consumes huge amounts of money for experimentation, however, the financial economical benefit which comes out of CERN for instance or the Fermi Lab is so minute compared to the investment that it can be classified as almost useless for a country like Egypt and of secondary importance for a country as rich as Kuwait for the next 100 years. That does not mean we should not participate in such activity but compared to nanotechnology all this CERN stuff is of secondary importance. Only atomic energy is important for the economy of poor developing countries but atomic energy is not high energy physics. In fact compared to CERN this is relatively low energy physics, but atomic energy and reactor research is extremely important and will become much more so in the not too distant future when the price of oil surpasses the 90 US dollar mark. Nevertheless and paradoxically so, developing countries are ignoring peaceful atomic research and the development of modern and safe atomic reactors and are extremely slow on nanotechnology. This is clearly irrational or ignorance. Alternatively it may be a sheer lack of control of destiny and total surrender to erratic political circumstances, more or less like a candle in the wind to put it mildly and melodically. Nanotechnology touches or will touch every aspect of our life. For simplicity we will divide the field into three major activities. Nanomaterial science, nanoelectronics and nanomedicine. Needless to say they all interact. In fact the writer is the Editor of an international interdisciplinary journal devoted partially to nanotechnology. Nano is interdisciplinary by its very nature and by definition. 1.3. Various applications of nanotechnology Let us start with one of the largest and fastest growing research areas of nanotechnology which is related to our health. In medicine less is frequently more. The side effects of medicine are more often than not just as harmful as the disease we want to cure. Using nanodevices to deliver the medicine accurately to the damaged tissues and cells will increase the chances of healing tremendously. Instead of shooting blindly with a radioactive machine gun to cure cancer we have a sniper which targets only those cancer cells without killing innocent bystander cells. There is a huge new field called nanobot reminding us of the Hollywood science fiction film “The strange voyage” of 1965. Shrinking the heroin of the film, Raquel Welsh to nanosize is of course science fiction which will remain fiction probably for hundreds of years if not for ever, but the idea of sending a miniature apparatus not much larger than 1 mm and 1/10 mm radius into the blood stream which could then remove blockages in the arteries may quite soon become a science, not fiction. In fact, we are almost there with regards to a dialysis machine for kidney patients which is sufficiently small to implant inside the person suffering from kidney failure. Similar technologies may be used for diabetic patients. I have just told a dear friend of mine who studied with me in Germany in the early sixties of the last century and who had a stent placed in one of the main blood paths to his heart a few years ago, that unless this stent is coated with a special nanomaterial, trouble will be pre-programmed. However a nanostent helps the healing process and prevents clotting of the blood [3], [4] and [5]. In electronics we know the pivotal rule of silicon. Miniaturization of electronic chips depends totally on silicon, but we are reaching the limit and soon will not be able to make silicon chips any smaller. Luckily nanotechnology has given us a new material, namely nanotubes which can do all what silicon can do and more and could reduce the size considerably. Nanotubes are science fact and application of this new technology is too numerous to cover in this letter. There are many more applications of nanotechnology, like nanofridges which kill any smell producing germs and nano and smart clothes, some of which are already on the market. Smart clothes depend of course on sensors, but sensors have many other applications in nanosecurity research. There are two extremes in nanotechnology. On the one hand, we have visionaries like Eric Drexel the Director of the Foresight Institute in California who dreams of a nanomotor which is a very small engine driven by the Brownian motion in fluids such as water as well as changing sand into meat because both are made of atoms and molecules [5]. On the other extreme we have nanotubes and new nanomaterials. These are science facts. The majority of research effort in nanotechnology will lie somewhere between these two extremes. Only research will show where fact and where fiction lies in the nanovision of the world [5]. The results of this research will change our world beyond recognition. 1.4. Financial considerations How much will the launching of a nanotechnology initiative cost and where could one start? This is a practical and realistic question. I think for a country like say Egypt one would need 300 million dollars over say five years. This is not much, not at all considering the enormous gain. Developing countries should send PhD students abroad to work on nanoresearch. They should bring leading scientists from abroad to work for a few years training their staff. At the same time they should coordinate between the different groups already working on various aspects of nanotechnology, probably in total isolation. In all events however the initiative must be independent of any of the well known and loathed developing world bureaucratic systems or it will fail. Although funding in say an oil rich country is presently not a problem in general, funding should be provided up to 50% by the government. The rest of the money should come from enlightened rich personalities. In addition many Institutions may want to have the honour of investing in the future of a world without poverty, without war and without terrorism. It is interesting to see that Israel is number 5 world wide with regards to public funding per capita of nanotechnology just after Switzerland and way before the United Kingdom which is number 13. Israel is a magnificent model for what a serious nanotechnology program should look like in all of the Middle East. It is also very important that such a new project has the support of the respective government and be put under the auspices of the Head of State. In the USA it is under the auspices of President Clinton and in Israel under Shimon Peres, two well known and highly visible personalities. 1.5. The function of a nanoinitiative Following the example of the USA as well as Israel, it is easy to see that the function of a nanoinitiative must be multiverse: • It will supervise a first class cutting edge Research Institute working in various disciplines. For instance a country with an all important oil industry is where much of the effort should go. • It will supervise the private sector and coordinate between various Institutions and Universities working in nanotechnology. • It will raise funding and keep international connections between the country in question and the outside world. • Encourage public awareness of the importance of science in general and nanotechnology in particular. • Work towards a regional nanoinitiative including all regional powers. 1.6. The Clinton initiative and wider aspects of the role of nanotechnology When President Clinton introduced the nanotechnology initiative in his speech in the year 2000, he borrowed generously from Richard Feynmann‘s famous 1958 lecture “There is plenty of room down there” by noting that one day we could store the library of the congress on a device the size of a sugar cube. One can see here that the demarcation line between science fiction and science fact is blurred indeed. I feel that if at all possible, someone with the necessary courage should meet the supreme political leadership in every developing country and inform them that he has bad news and good news for them. The bad news is that the rivals are right now working feverishly on a new modern invention which will devastate them in peace without a single bullet fired or moving a single soldier. The good news is that the people in developing countries are quite capable of developing the very same inventions needed to protect themselves in peace, if they are given the means to start developing nanotechnology projects now. Only those who have nothing to loose go to war. Happy people do not go to war. 1.7. A workshop on nanotechnology and conclusion If the above is not completely sufficient to convince all decision makers in the developing countries of the vital importance of the above nanoinitiative, I propose to hold a very high level workshop on nanotechnology as soon as possible in order to promote the idea. To be sure, such a workshop is essential anyway. What is debatable is only the timing and whether this workshop should be held before or after a decree of establishing a National Institute of Nanotechnology and commencing a nanotechnology initiative. Either way I propose that such a workshop, in addition to an exhibition of nanoproducts should be held as soon as possible in every country seeking to join the new scientific, industrial revolution in order that the general public may become fully ware of the dawn of the nanoage. References [1] M.S. El Naschie Chaos and fractals in nano and quantum technology Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 9 (10) (1998), pp. 1793–1802 View Record in Scopus | Citing articles (7) [2] Aref M. Knocking on the doors of nanotechnology. Al Hayat Newspaper, Issue No. 120736 (in Arabic), Wednesday January 14th, 1998. [3] L.E. Foster Nanotechnology Prentice Hall, New York (2006) [4] P. Ball Designing the molecular world Princeton, New Jersey (1994) [5] Drexler KE. Engines of creation. Fourth Estate, London, 1990. [6] T. Ando, et al. Mesoscopic physics and electronics Springer, Heidelberg (1998) [7] P. Weibel, G. Ord, O. Rössler Spacetime physics and fractality Springer, Vienna, (NY) (2005) Address: P.O. Box 272, Cobham, Surrey KT11 2FQ, United Kingdom. Copyright © 2006 Elsevier Ltd
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