Posts Tagged "Nanometers"

Do you remember ‘Fantastic Voyage’ – the sci-fi film in which scientists shrank a submarine and crew, injected them into a dying man, and saved him from certain death before being resized for more adventures?

Scripted by Harry Kleiner in 1966 and novelized for Bantam paperbacks 6 months later by Isaac Asimov, it spawned an animated TV series as well as a Salvador Dali painting. Now, some 40 years later, it is seeing practical application in space and cancer medicine, as well as arguably more prosaic areas like materials science.

Today it is called ‘Nanotechnology’ and in this series of brief articles we’ll be exploring how it is beginning to influence the world around us. It begins by linking medical and building science.

Nanontechnology in a Nutshell

The science of Nanotechnology deals with very, very small structures, usually less than 100 nanometers in diameter. With 1 nanometer being 1 billionth of a meter, you’ll get some idea of how small this is by imagining the earth as having a diameter of 1 meter with 1 billion apple pips (seeds) inside it. Or, looked at another way, the dimension ratio between a meter and a nanometer is the same as between earth and an apple.

For the mathematical purists among you 1nm = 10 -09 m, i.e. 1/1,000,000,000
Einstein might have imagined this by building a train wagon in his mind, giving this a length, width and height of 1nm and then fitting this inside a few hundreds of hydrogen molecules.