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The Whole Elephant > 1 > 2 > 3 > 4

A Jolt of the Juice

First, who are these nanoguys? About 18 years ago, when Russ Taylor was a teenager going home after school to hotrod his father’s computers, Rich Superfine (his real name) finished college and went to work as a technician in Bell Laboratories. Sean Washburn was working in an IBM research lab in Yorktown Heights. At that moment, in 1982, two scientists at IBM Zurich, Gerd Binnig and Henrich Rohrer, were inventing the scanning probe microscope. The invention struck like a bolt of lightning, and Superfine felt the juice. So did Sean Washburn.

To see why this invention was such a big deal, we need to talk hardware a minute. Think about an ordinary microscope. It uses reflected light magnified through lenses. This is okay for stuff as small as bacteria or cells. But a light wave is about 540 nanometers long, several hundred times longer than, say, a carbon atom. At that scale, ordinary microscopes go blind.

The scanning probe microscope was different. It used a tiny stylus mounted on a swinging arm, something like the tone arm of an old-fashioned record player except a great deal smaller and more precise. As the tip swept back and forth across a surface, gliding up and down over bumps and dips, the arm sent a stream of data to a computer. Like a blind man reading braille, the scanning probe microscope saw by touch, not by light.

At Bell Labs, scientists began aiming this new instrument at silicon, the stuff of microchips and the material on which the computer revolution would take its magic-carpet ride. “There was a particular surface of silicon that people did not understand,” Superfine recalls. “Then this new technique came along, and suddenly they were able to see the individual atoms sitting on the surface of the silicon. And so here was a controversy that had been raging for years, and it was like the proverbial elephant in the dark, with different scientists grabbing onto a leg, a trunk, an ear, and all arguing about the shape of the elephant. And then suddenly someone turns on the lights and you can see the whole elephant.”

But the elephant was sketchy, at first. When Superfine talks at conferences, he pulls out a copy of the research paper by Rohrer and Binnig. The paper contains a photo of their cardboard model, made with scissors and glue.

“Each time the microscope went over the surface, they recorded a line, and this line is a curve, in space,” Superfine explains. “So when you collect an image, what you’re doing is you’re putting a sequence of those curves together, to make a continuous picture. Well, they didn’t have the technology for putting those lines together to make a picture. So they took each one of those lines, they drew it onto cardboard, they cut out each line, then they glued them together, and they made a picture of this cardboard model, and that’s what they sent in with their paper—essentially the paper that won them the Nobel Prize.”

Nobody wanted to be fooling with cardboard and glue, so a few researchers began programming computers to take the probe data and generate pictures, with simulated shadows and glowing highlights. “Some of these images were beautiful,” Superfine recalls. “They had emotional impact.”

Hard Problems, Cool Tools

Jump to 1991. Rich Superfine has finished a Ph.D. and has landed in Carolina’s physics and astronomy department with a big-ticket item on his wish list: a new type of scanning probe microscope known as an atomic force microscope (AFM). He has never forgotten those years when the lights went on at Bell Labs. And he has never forgotten the pretty pictures. But he hasn’t yet met the people who will help him put the two together.

Meanwhile, Warren Robinett from computer science was getting together with a friend of his from graduate school, Stan Williams, who was a professor of chemistry at UCLA at the time. Williams was working with a scanning probe microscope, and Robinett had a background in virtual reality—the use of computers to simulate real environments. Together, they began combining virtual-reality techniques with microscopy. Fred Brooks, who was leading graphics projects in computer science, thought the work might be a good fit for one of his students, Russ Taylor. “This sounds like an interesting project,” Brooks said. “Why don’t we put Russ on it?”

To read between the lines here, you need to know about Fred Brooks.

Computer scientists, generally speaking, are not known for paying homage. By habit, they question authority. They value the new, the now, the next. They are not the sort of people who commission a lot of bronze busts. In the case of Fred Brooks, however, they have made an exception. They have set a bronze bust of Brooks in a fine, sunny room in Sitterson Hall, to remind themselves that this man, their colleague and elder statesman, is also their visionary leader. It was Brooks who had shown them that computers could help people see. It was Brooks who had insisted that computer science should serve something other than itself, that it should reach out to the natural sciences, to engineering and architecture—to the world—and find real problems to solve. And so when Brooks said, “This sounds like an interesting project,” people knew what he meant. He meant that the project would be hard, intellectually. It would reach way beyond the bounds of computer science. And it would be real.

That was just fine by Russ Taylor. Taylor was a tool smith and a problem solver who wanted hard problems and cool tools. Suddenly, here they were. So he went to work. He would need every scrap of what he’d learned: parallel computation (sort of like using several hammers to drive the same nail), graphics hardware acceleration, virtual environments, and distributed systems (computers at various locations working together). These were strengths of the department, and they happened to be precisely the strengths the project required. Taylor also needed a graphics computer. A fast one.

“At the time the nanoManipulator was developed,” Taylor says, “it could only have been done here because we needed to use Pixel Planes five, which was the world’s fastest graphics computer. There was only one, and it was here.” Fortunately, when Taylor looked around his department, he also found head-mounted displays for experiments in virtual reality, and a robotic arm used to dock simulated drugs into proteins. So a lot of the pieces he needed were ready and waiting. “Having all of that equipment here and all of that expertise here let me as a student just go do this,” Taylor says.

It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. The R&D took years.

> NEXT PAGE: Pictures from the Dark Side

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

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