Abstract:
The dawn of nanoscience and nanotechnology is considered to be the lecture
There's plenty of room at the bottom delivered by a visionary physicist, Richard
Feynmann in 1959 [1]. Drexler elaborated this idea in his technical book Nanosystems
[2]. Since ancient Roman times, colloidal gold has been known and was used to colour glass
with intense shades of yellow, red, or mauve varying the concentration of gold. Before the
name nanoscience and technology was coined, Michael Faraday prepared colloidal Au sol
and named it as a metallic divided state [3]. Nano (=dwarf in Greek) is a scale (=10-9) rather
than a specific discipline of science or engineering. The science of nanotechnology is
basically looking at important phenomena that become apparent when one goes to very small
scales. To get a feel for the nanoscale, one can take an example of a strand of human hair
(~60-100 ?m) width. A nanometer is ~10,000 times smaller than a single strand of hair. In
simple terM.S., one nanometer is to a tennis ball, what a tennis ball is to the Earth. A cartoon
comparison of various natural and man-made nano and micron sized systems is shown below
(Figure I.1).
Figure
