I can not say how correct or incorrect this article is as i know nothing about nano technology. i know that nano is very very small. I think this article was quite useful to people like me. because it explains things in an easier way. Plus it helps with the work we have to do in science. ^_^ INdeed i know many people who think this is quite useful but i know many would say it is not correct or it is not detailed enough. but i think it's just right for normal people who know nothing about the technology.

I couldn't get past the second paragraph of Alan Goldstein's "nano" thesis because I couldn't buy his basic notion of size. If a ball's size were a factor solely of its diameter, then, sure, to get a ball that's a millionth of the original, you'd reduce its diameter to a millionth of the original. Now, I'm no mathematician, but isn't the size of a ball (or sphere) more correctly characterized by its volume (i.e., its 3-dimensionality)? In that case, to yield a volume that's a millionth of the original, you'd reduce the diameter only to a hundredth of its original size -- far, far larger than the 75 nanometers he cites. (It's all a matter of cubing.)

Given the fuzziness of Goldstein's initial premise, what was the point of reading on?

While Goldstein's article contains some good information, it is written in a deeply biased manner, clearly leading up to The Big New Technology Scare. The author's cautions about military (mis)use and a headlong rush into new but poorly understood technologies are well founded, but the style of the article is salacious to the point of being inaccurate.

The quantum world impinges on the macroscopic world everywhere, all of the time. A prism placed in sunlight will reveal dark bands in the rainbow spectrum of the Sun; these absorption lines identify vast macroscopic quantities of gas (like Helium, first discovered in the Sun) revealing their true quantum nature. Goldstein describes a phony divide between the quantum world and the "physical" world --- no such division exists.

Goldstein implies that we are on the brink of a dangerous new quantum techology world, but we in fact use purely quantum mechanical devices every day: lasers scan barcodes at the grocery store, modern hard drives take advantage of the quantum mechanical spin properties of matter to encode information, digital cameras count individual electrons, and semi conductors --- found in every piece of junk electronics --- rely deeply on the quantum behavior of electrons.

If this sort of writing, sacrificing accuracy for effect, is what "futurism" is about, then let's do ourselves a favor and file futurism as a sub-genre of science fiction.