Nano-technology

But nano just means ten to the minus nine, so it’s ten to the minus nine of a metre. So it’s a millionth of a….hang on so it’s a millionth of a millimetre, so it’s a tiny tiny fraction of a human hair. So it just means anything small. And in the same way it might seem a bit strange to classify science by anything big, you know you wouldn’t get scientists saying, “Oh I work in house-sized science,” meaning I work on cars or trains, or computers. It’s slightly strange to talk about tiny, tiny science, because it can be lots of different things, it can be drug delivery systems, it can be developing new molecules, but a lot of it, the stuff that gets the press really worked up, is what they call….is these nano-bots, this idea that if you can get molecules that are very very small, that can self replicate these nano-bots, you can build things.

In theory you can get your little nano-bot to put two different sets of atoms together to make one molecule and then another one, and then another one, and then you can get them to make lots of different nano-bots, and those nano-bots, and the theory is you could build an entire space ship just starting from a bunch of stuff, because these nano-bots can work on this scale.

Now the flip side of this, the thing that gets the press sometimes a bit worked up, is the theory you can do bad things with this. You could get these robots to come and mess around molecules just to mix everything up together, so it could be….it will be a whole mess of molecules and this is what they call the ‘grey goo phenomenon’, and back in Britain Prince Charles has got particularly worked up about the ‘grey goo phenomenon’, and about whether it’s going to cause all sorts of damage. But the main idea is anything to do with nano-technology is very very small scale stuff, and New Zealand is setting itself up to be a leading nation in terms of nano-technology development, because there is all sorts of possible applications, and there is all sorts of different ways, and it’s going to make better circuitry, better plastics, better materials, and better ways of delivering drugs, just by getting down and working at these fundamental properties.

The thing about matter is the way it behaves on a big scale. You know if you’ve got a lump of wood that is one foot long, or a lump of wood that is two foot long, or fifty feet long, it pretty much behaves the same way. But when you get down to this tiny level of molecules, matter begins to develop some really interesting and weird properties, and the more you can understand it the more you can develop new things. There are things like ‘shape memory metals’ where you can make something, it can be a particular shape and you can suddenly heat it slightly and it can change shape completely and utterly and develop new properties. So we are only just beginning to understand some of these applications.