Nanotechnology focuses on medicine, military systems, energy, and information technology. Nanotechnology education requires cross-training in various fields. The industry is funded globally and is expected to grow rapidly. It has the potential to revolutionize industrial processes and human health. The industry was sparked by K. Eric Drexler and Richard Feynman’s ideas of self-replicating molecular machines and direct manipulation of atoms.
The nanotechnology industry is an interdisciplinary research and development field in most of the physical and life sciences. Molecular nanotechnology as of 2011 largely focuses on developments in the four key fields of medicine, military systems, energy, and information technology, although research may touch on nearly any area of industrial or commercial interest. The focus of the business models of nanotechnology companies in the early 21st century tends to be in materials science and pharmaceutical drug creation and delivery systems. That’s because making unique chemical and material structures is easier to engineer than the more mature nanotechnologies of the future, which will have an increasing focus on autonomous, self-replicating machines built to perform specific tasks.
Because the nanotechnology industry can be incredibly broad-based and bring improvements in materials and machine operation to virtually any process, nanotechnology education must attempt to convey a sense of understanding of many research areas. This often results in experts in certain fields such as physics, chemistry or crystallography being cross-trained in fields such as microbiology and electrical engineering so that they can work in other disciplines to fully understand processes acting at the molecular scale. New students in the field of nanotechnology are expected to gain a fundamental understanding of different areas of human knowledge. These include physics, chemistry, microbiology and related life sciences and practical applications for these sciences in various engineering fields.
The growth of the nascent nanotechnology industry is funded by a wide variety of governments around the world, from those of the European Union, to Japan, India, Russia, the United States and Australia. As of 2011, an estimated $10,000,000,000 US dollars (USD) is spent annually on a global basis on such research, and this figure is expected to increase to $65,000,000,000 dollars by the end of the same year. By 2014, estimates indicate that global research spending will be $100,000,000,000 USD, and by 2015, it should approach $250,000,000,000 USD. Developing countries are also investing heavily in the nanotechnology industry, with China’s spending surpassing that of the United States in 2011.
In many respects, successfully building any viable nanotechnology application is a race to a finish line where the winner will hold patents on devices or materials that have the potential to have global implications and change society in unforeseen and game-changing ways. Many scientists see the nanotechnology industry as the beginning of a second industrial revolution that is quietly happening in laboratories around the world and largely unnoticed by the public. This is despite a few thousand products and materials already on the retail market as of 2011 with features engineered at the nanoscale.
The widespread interest in the nanotechnology industry is a direct result of how much of a general purpose science it is. It has the ability to take any known chemical or mechanical process and make it more efficient and powerful by controlling reactions that occur on an atomic and molecular scale, something unprecedented in human history. Scaling the control of these processes down to the macro level of daily human activity has the potential to build industrial processes that can recycle 100% of their waste products or take the waste produced by previous generations of society and refine it into new useful materials reconstructing its basic molecular structure.
Nanotech machines also have the potential to be able to bypass fundamental roadblocks in human understanding. Acting as a form of universal mechanics, such microscopically programmed machines may one day be able to replace damaged cells or organs in the human body by producing new ones from the molecular scale up, without needing to figure out what caused the body to fail. organ first. The nanotechnology industry aims, therefore, to leverage knowledge in chemistry, physics and biology to act as a form of assembly line worker, replacing worn out materials and systems with new ones and using potential waste materials as raw material. to do it . Natural systems like trees have done this since time immemorial by building complex structures one cell at a time, but, until recently, human society has only acted to shape and utilize the end results of that growth.
Both K. Eric Drexler with his 1986 book, The Engines of Creation, and Richard Feynman’s 1959 speech, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, are considered the fundamental sparks that created a storm of interest in science and engineering for the nanotechnology industry. Drexler believed that there were no fundamental limits to creating self-replicating molecular machines that could eventually construct any device or material from general source matter. Feynman promoted the same idea by stating that direct manipulation of atoms was a practical possibility.
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