What Can I Do?
Perplexed about how to get involved in nanotechnology, Underprepared writes "As an Idea for the coming years a Career Search Program would be of help to many people such as myself, Who have an interest in Nanotechnology but no real objective or goal for it. Especially due to the overwhelming interest there will be in the next few years." Underprepared writes:
I am in Electronics Engineering at the Technologist level. I have read a lot about nanotechnology such as (NNI 2003 Budget). I know of the dramatic impact it will have, changing almost every aspect of the way we live over the next few hundred years. I see many dilemmas that will arise because of the speed at which the technology is growing. I have found far more than a wealth of information related to this topic, on this site alone. It excites me but drains me at the same time. I cannot spend my life reading about it anymore, I read at too slow of a pace. It is a waste of my time because there is just too much information. (Though I continue reading)
I have recently encountered a problem. For a long time I wanted to enter into the field of nanotechnology. The only courses I saw were available at the masters level. So I have and am still attempting to attain this. However, my marks are not where I want them to be and it seems I cannot continue my education. (Though I will still try)
I want to get involved but I am lost. I see that I am far ahead of most people. Just knowing about Nanotechnology sets us apart from the general population. From my experience most people do not know about it.
So my question. What can I do?? I have some of the knowledge of the field and I have skills in electronics.
Someone to talk with would be nice, I use MSN Messenger if you would like to chat.
As an Idea for the coming years a Career Search Program would be of help to many people such as myself, Who have an interest in Nanotechnology but no real objective or goal for it. Especially due to the overwhelming interest there will be in the next few years.
March 1st, 2004 at 10:05 AM
The intersection between electronics and MNT
There would seem to me to be a couple of possibilities. One is to move yourself towards one of the manufacturers of Scanning Probe Microscopes or Atomic Force Microscopes (SPMs & AFMs) — or perhaps Zyvex since they are all producing equipment that requires electronics. The other possibility is to work yourself into one of the Nanotech research centers that the National Science Foundation is funding (there is one at the Univ. of Washington for example) or one of the companies that is really *working* on the electronics side of nanotechnology — e.g. IBM's millipede storage drive or HP's efforts to wire together very small circuits are examples.
My experience in running biotech companies says that while having people to write the grants, design the experiments, etc. is all fine and good one still needs people who can connect the network, diagnose problems and when necessary perform repairs. Also — don't be afraid to explore biotech/electronics, esp. biorobotics, as well. For example the demand for microsensors of various types (for medical tests and security monitoring) is only going to increase (they have to get smaller, faster, provide more information, etc.). You should perhaps monitor publications like EETimes or Genetic Engineering News (which I don't think is online but one can get a free subscription) for companies that are pushing forward in these areas and then monitor their job openings pages on a regular basis.
Robert
March 1st, 2004 at 10:49 AM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
I'm a college student majoring in computer science. I'm very interested in entering the nanotech field. Do you have any suggestions on what I should study? If need be, I'm more than willing to take subjects off my main course line if it will help in the long run. Email me or contact me on Yahoo Instant Messenger (rain_dragon1)
March 1st, 2004 at 11:14 AM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
Nanotechnology is very wide field, that will require many discplines. The main disciplines, of course, will be heavy chemistry and biology, but in order to lay down the groundwork, Computer Science, as well as Electrical Engineering will be needed in order to create the toolsets required.
My advice, at the moment, would be to study as much Chemistry as you can – both inorganic and organic. If you're more interested in 'wet' Nanotechnology, then you should study as much biology as you can.
March 1st, 2004 at 3:42 PM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
Wow, for once I actually agree with Kadamose. :-;
First you have to recognize that most educational instituions are not currently setup to teach nanotechnology. So you have to extract it from the traditional departments as best you can. You may want to make a decision as to whether you want to focus on "dry" nanotechnology — which probably means mechanosynthesis, AFMs, STMs, etc. or "wet" nanotechnology — which means biochemistry and molecular biology. You can "skip" to the end and take biochemistry without inorganic and organic chemistry but you will lose some of the details (and it may be much more difficult).
My history includes a lot of electronics and computer science and then on top of that something like 3 quarters of inorganic chemistry, 2 quarters of organic chemistry, 1 quarter of organic lab, 3 quarters of biochemistry, something like 6+ quarters of microbiology and 3 quarters of graduate student molecular biology. If you are clever you may be able to get away with skipping the inorganic and organic chemistry and much of the microbiology and still end up with a good grasp of nanotechnology. That is mainly for the "wet" side.
If you want to focus on the "dry" side, then you want things like basic mechanical engineering and perhaps fluid dynamics (heat removal is important for both current electronics and future nanotechnology). Then maybe add on top of that molecular modeling if you can get it. (Molecular modeling should probably be a subject for joint Chemistry and CompSci department efforts.)
On top of this if one can find "materials science" courses they would be probably be useful from either the dry or the wet side. Most probably found in the Engineering school looking at the strength of materials, heat tolerance, electrical conductivity, etc. For example an unanswered question is "What would be the properties of nanoscale chainmail?" How would you construct it? Would it be stable? etc.
There are traditional CompSci/Math areas such as Systems Analysis and Complexity Theory that tend to span both the dry and wet aspects of nanotechnology.
Ultimately, one has to spend a lot of time looking at the course catalog. I'll post a subsequent note about how one might read Nanosystems to help with decisions in this area.
Robert
March 1st, 2004 at 4:26 PM
How to read Nanosystems
It is important when studying nanotechnology to understand how complex and interdisciplinary it is.
The dedication in Nanosystems says it all:
Actually, Eric did much of the hard part but he recognized how difficult the rest of it was going to be. So the first thing to recognize up front is how difficult the task is. But in life the most valued rewards are never easy.
I graduated from High School #3 in my class and was accepted at Harvard, MIT and Cornell. Had I choosen to attend MIT instead of Harvard I might have met Eric and learned many things from him. According to my school transcripts my IQ is over 130. In my years of looking at what Eric has done I have concluded his IQ is in the 150-170 range (we have never discussed this). The development of this science of nanotechnology is *not* going to be easy because it is sitting on top of the shoulders of people like Feynman and Drexler. It is also important to realize that Eric spent the better part of a decade doing the research necessary to produce Nanosystems. There are very few people who will be able to grasp its depth in a single reading. I have spent almost a decade reading and rereading Nanosystems and I still continue to learn things from it.
So… the question becomes "How do we handle this in small chunks?".
The first part is to start with the simple stuff, e.g. "Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview" and perhaps "Chapter 16: Paths to Molecular Manufacturing". Then work into "Chapter 2: Classical Magnitudes and Scaling Laws".
Then move on to what you know best. So for me with a background in electronics and computer science that was "Chapter 12: Nanomechanical Computational Systems". Then "Chapter 6: Transitions, Errors, and Damage" (we all know computers need ECC codes) and then things like "Chapter 7: Energy Dissipation" (computers have to stay cool) and then onto "Chapter 10: Mobile Interfaces and Moving Parts" and "Chapter 11: Intermediate Subsystems" and "Chapter 14: Molecular Manufacturing Systems". These from my perspective were aspects of "Systems Analysis". Only much later did I begin to deal with the molecular and quantum aspects discussed in Nanosystems.
For someone trained in chemistry or physics the entry points might be much different with starting points such as "Chapter 4: Molecular Dynamics" or "Chapter 5: Positional Uncertainty" and moving on to "Chapter 8: Mechanosynthesis" and/or "Chapter 9: Nanoscale Structural Components".
The point being that one should take small bites out of Nanosystems and digest them a little bit at a time.
Eventually we may have a world where the nanotechnology centers break Nanosystems and the various volumes of Nanomedicine down into small pieces that college or high school students can digest. Until those days arrive one has to steer oneself down the nanotechnology mountain as best one can.
Robert
March 2nd, 2004 at 2:50 PM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
how about optical engineering as a pathway to nano? is nano-optics a viable field, or is nano going to circumvent optics altogether?
March 2nd, 2004 at 8:40 PM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
All forms of engineering are going to play a big role in Nanotech. And optics is going to play a big role as well – Holographic Memory is a wonderful example.
March 3rd, 2004 at 5:34 AM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
I agree with Kadamose (!?!). Holographic memory is a pretty good example because some of the time it is based on crystals of lithium niobate which would largely be self-assembled and reasonably precise at the atomic scale.
Other fairly good examples would include VCSEL (lasers) and quantum dots both of which are generally grown with near atomic precision using various types of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). VCSELs can be structured to produce laser frequencies that were generally unavailable. Quantum dots have been around for a while and scientists at NIST have recently been able to manufacture them such that they can produce single photons. I could imagine these being used in creative ways to assist in the assembly of highly precise nanoscale devices.
The only thing that would be lacking is real atomic scale precision. That could be due to impurities in the materials from which the devices are assembled or variations in the assembly process.
One could actually view the optical components in the high power lasers used in the National Ignition Facility at LLNL as the largest nanoscale devices manufactured to date. See "Amplifying the beam" here. The quality of the glass used to amplify the beams has to be very good to keep the quality of all 192 laser beams being produced the same.
Real directed assembly with atomic precision using processes such as mechanosynthesis or others that produce atomic precision based on self-assembly or mechanoenzymes will probably allow one to assemble optical devices with more interesting properties due to the ability to make creative use of quantum effects. For example it has been demonstrated that there are materials and methods which allow you to store information in the individual energy levels of the electrons of groups of atoms. I would imagine there will be some very creative applications of this property for ultrahigh density data storage if one can manufacture complex combinations atoms with atomic precision. Currently MBE doesn't easily allow this to be done.
Robert
March 3rd, 2004 at 9:04 AM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
how about optical engineering as a pathway to nano?
Nano-optics may have applications for visualizing nanostructures, and thus could be useful for validating that a desired component has been assembled correctly, or positioned correctly. Intriguingly, such techniques may have some ability to see into materials, unlike most scanning probe microscopies which can sample only the surface. For example, the Rochester Nano-Optics group claims to be working toward "a multidimensional image of a [biological] membrane". Unfortunately, their resolution isn't so good: "The highest spatial resolution we achieved so far is around 17 nm". This is fantastically better than the best optical microscope, but still large on an atomic scale. Whether nano-optics techniques can be adapted to build things seems to be an open question. The Rochester group states: "If near-field optics permits the interaction of light and matter with a resolution of nanometers, then manipulation of matter on the nanometer scale should be possible." But, unless I missed something in my skimming, they haven't demonstrated this capability yet.
is nano-optics a viable field [?]
You mean as a route to nanotech, right? My impression is that it's one of the many scanning microscopies that will contribute (is contributing, perhaps) to the development of nanotech, but that currently it's limited by the resolution achieved. So far, STM and ATM can do much better both in terms of resolution and in terms of manipulation, but nano-optics may offer other compensating advantages.
is nano going to circumvent optics altogether?
I'm not sure what you're asking. Robert has commented on the applications of nanofabrication to the creation of photonic devices. It seems to me that the question of the extent to which EM fields (of optical or other frequencies) can be shaped and manipulated on the nano-scale (as opposed to the traditional applications mentioned by Robert) is largely open. In particular, the issue of state preparation for the QED field has been studied principally in the context of cavity QED (so far as I'm aware), but I think it takes on new aspects in the context of nanotechnology. Thus exactly what fields we can create on small scales, and what we can do with them there, is fairly wide open.
June 1st, 2004 at 5:22 PM
Re:The intersection between electronics and MNT
Right now, I am a student at a Jr. College. Wanting to go to Illinois (IIT) then Cal. (CIT). Would working on nanodoctors be considered "dry" or "wet". Any information would be helpful.
January 22nd, 2006 at 2:53 AM
hello,
i am a production engineer and willing to enter the world of nnotech,
can anybody guide me to gate of this world?
plz mail me for ‘what can i do with this manufacturing tecnology background’ at ‘suracul@gmail.com’
March 28th, 2006 at 7:55 AM
Hi I am Gaurav.I had done bachlors degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering .I want to buld up my carer in nanotecnology.So do i have career option in it .or any options for masters degree in it.