Why is Nanotechnology Unpredictable?
If nanotechnology involved a smooth transition from the microscale to the nanoscale, it wouldn’t be all that interesting. Much of our available knowledge base could be applied, and the possibility of radical new discoveries would be rather small. Luckily (or unluckily depending on your perspective) what happens at the nanoscale is very hard to predict. Materials that we thought we understood well exhibit strange new properties. That the transition to the nanoscale should be so unpredictable is rather unsettling. From an early age we learn that the properties of materials don’t depend on their size. Materials can be scaled up or down readily. A block of wood a certain size can support a certain amount of weight- a larger block can support more weight. Or we learn that a wire that conducts electricity also generates a magnetic field. A larger or smaller piece of metal still generates a magnetic field when current passes through- this property doesn’t change with the size of the piece of
