For the big picture, start small.

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The Whole Elephant
by Neil Caudle

We’ll try to do this without hype because Russ Taylor and Rich Superfine and Sean Washburn tell us that hype doesn’t help. So we are not going to promise you a time when you will stroll around in an airborne cloud of teeny-tiny machines all invisibly whirring in tune with your needs. We are not going to promise you much of anything at all. Except a story.

So here goes.

From this point forward, please think small. Virus, molecule, atom. That small. Not so many years ago, life on that scale was fuzzy and remote, like faraway stars. A scientist could see these tiny things, dimly, but the rest of us took them on faith.

Not any more. Let’s say you have a son or daughter at Orange High School in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Your teenager may have sat down at a computer there, fired up an Internet link to the physics and astronomy department in Chapel Hill, goosed a robotic arm into gear, and whacked, shoved, mashed or otherwise bullied a virus. Yes, a teenager can actually do this.

There is a long word for this kind of shoving and mashing and whacking: Nanomanipulation. Nano means, roughly, “a billionth.” A nano-meter is one billionth of a meter. So a nano-Manipulator is something that manipulates nano-size stuff.

This is the scale we’ll be talking about, so, from here on, please expect a bit of nano-this and nano-that.

> NEXT PAGE: A Jolt of the Juice

© Copyright 2000 Endeavors magazine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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