Designing a nanotechnology major
PingS writes "I am going to be a sophomore in electrical engineering this upcoming year. I have been tracking nanotechnology for the past four months, and read through multiple literatures on the Foresight website including Engines of Creation and the Unbounding Future. I have also read the recent publication Recent Advances and Issues in Molecular Nanotechnology. I am currently working on Nanosystems, but it is 'very technical' for a sophomore, so I am progressing 'very slowly'. I want to let you guys know that I have done a lot of background research into nanotechnology and am familiar with most of the current issues and debates (Smalley, Whitesides).
More…. I am designing my own nanotechnology curriculum. It appears to me that the original Drexlerian vision is that nanotechnology should be an engineering feat supported by prolonged, coordinated scientific efforts. However, so far, most of the suggestions for an undergraduate nanotechnology education have been for a triple natural sciences major: physics/chemistry/biology. Makes it a little hard for an engineering major to graduate from undergraduate.
Therefore, I have multiple questions regarding the importance of the studies mentioned in the various discussions. Most of them are presented in comparative terms.
I. Mathematics
Vector Calculus
Diff eq and linear algebra
- these mathematics should be the bare minimal for physics.
II. Sciences
Physics > biochemistry > chemistry > molecular biology > biology
- It appears that physics is central to nano, and is fundamental to the understanding of chemistry. Molecular biology is helpful to take advantage of evolution's engineering accomplishments. Chemistry is involved to make mechanosynthesis work.
III. Within Physics
- wave and optics –> electromagnetism —> lasers?
- Classical mechanics & electromagnetism —> quantum mechanics
- thermodynamics —> statistical mechanics
quantum mechanics seems to be the level of proficiency a nanotech person wants to be at. statistical mechanics helps with the thermo vibration problem. How about optics and lasers? I see this combination being part of the Flinders' undergrad curriculum.
IV. Within Chemistry
- molecular chemistry > organic chemistry > synthetic chemistry?
1. what roles and how big of a magnitude is physical chemistry in nanotech.
2. I know molecular chemistry being mentioned many times. However, it seems to me that molecular chemistry should couple with molecular biology to understand how to back-engineering living organisms.
3. organic chemistry? I have basic knowlege about polymers and DNA, protein, and enzyme function and structure. What is it that we want to look at within organic chemistry. For example, to understand how chemical bonds happen, why proteins unhold, or to study the structure of life's informational, manufacturing systems.
4. Does analytical chemistry plays any part in this?
V. Within Biology
cell biology & molecular biology?
I am terribly lacking in biology (everything I know about it is the rudimentary high school stuff). However, it appears to me that biology with mechanosynthesis is what Drexler proposed as the direct route to nanotechnology.
But if the short term focus is to make a nano assembler. Should the study of DNA plays any part in an undergrad nanotech education? Doesn't this eliminates much of the emphasis on biology.
VI. Engineering
I understand the main idea is to practice engineering principles of systems, subsystems, designing constrains, feedbacks within natural sciences. Drexler has a predilection towards mech. eng.(no surprise, since his earlier interests were in space exploration), it makes it slightly confusing in understand how other disciplines of engineering can contribute to molecular nanotechnology.
1. I know nothing about chemical engineering.
2. Within Mech E.
From my puny knowledge of mech E., the area of robotics is what Drexler's mechanical manipulators should benefit from.
3. Within electrical E.
A. MEMs
I am not sure if MEMs are beneficial towards nanotechnology because most of the devices created are from a "top down approach", and do not follow the surprusing physical phenomenons in nano, ie. electrostatic motors being favored.
B. EUV
This area is hot! From lithography to laser spectrascopy. However, how can technology from this field (with major commercial application in 2009) serves as platform or enabling technology for nano assemblers? Since everything here is still "top down" engineering.
C. circuit design
Is the current VLSI technology on the convergence with nano-computers Drexler talked about? I have the impression that Drexler wants to do everything mechanically.
I guess the main question here is how many of the proposed and pursued short term technologies today serve as enabling technology for nano? Undergraduate engineering is fairly introductory but it also limits some choices later so how many of these fields will actually lead to molecular engineering?
Any input and comment is welcome. My understanding of this field is fairly rudimentary and I'd greatly appreciate insights toward an undergrad education in nanotech.
November 13th, 2004 at 12:09 PM
A few comments
For a student in college attempting to deal with Nanosystems is rather difficult. I've been reading it for over ten years and I still don't have a good command of everything in it. My recommendation would be to read the first few chapters and the last few chapters, then work backwards into the technical detail of the chapters between as necessary. In particular pay attention to Chapter 16 and Table 16.1.
The technical aspects of the studies you mention are not as important as having a broad overview (at least as an undergraduate). Areas you did not seem to focus on… Basic microbiology — allows one to understand self-replication — not strictly necessary for nanotechnology and a topic of high controversy but one that all medical professionals have to deal with on a daily basis. Basic chemistry — focus on self-assembly — because we are currently limited to the few natural biological assemblers scientists are increasingly turning to self-assembly as a means to construct things. Basic biochemistry — what can the molecular machines that currently exist actually do (we are talking everything from enzymes to DNA polymerase to ribosomes to the F0-F1 ATPase). Basic systems analysis (this is a computer science aspect). Molecular systems are going to be complex and managing them is going to be even more complex. Finally basic mechanical engineering — understanding the forms things can take, what we know about them now, and if one is lucky how scaling laws apply as nanotechnology develops is important.
November 13th, 2004 at 2:58 PM
Re:A few comments
One more comment. If you can get it, learn surface science and surface-chemistry. How molecules react on surfaces, including binding energies and translation energies and such, will be very important to mechanosynthesis. An understanding of surface science will be essential for working on and understand tip-driven mechanochemical reactions.
November 14th, 2004 at 8:22 AM
Suggestions from a chemist
Having a chemistry degree myself, I feel qualified to offer some advice in that area. I shall first suggest that knowing chemistry is far more important that knowing biology when it comes to nanotech. Microbiology knowledge is useful when you are trying to use DNA-assisted synthesis, but it would be mostly the practical side. You'd want to know the laboratory techniques like culturing, purification, PCR, plasmid transfection, and sequencing, and to understand what they do. None of those techniques require
a lot of expertise beyond a general overview of cell structure and mitosis. The trouble with all biology knowledge is that it is descriptive. There are very few processes that have been understood, and even for those the mechanisms are simply a cursory overview of "this molecule goes here, that reaction uses 6 ATPs, etc." For this reason, a nanotechnologist is not likely to find biology terribly useful.
As far as chemistry courses go, I would add analytical and physical to your list. You want to have a really good grasp of how to analyze what you make, and if you can rip your nanostructure off the factory surface into the solution, analytical chemistry techniques will help you a lot in debugging your assemblers. Physical chemistry is absolutely essential for designing any sort of reaction. It is very important to be able to compute thermodynamic parameters of your reactions like activation energies, free energy change, and entropy. There will also be plenty of discussion about reaction kinetics and catalysts, both of which will help you with mechanosynthesis. I would also strongly suggest a course on polymers, since most nanostructures really are. Organic chemistry really is important, since all nanostructures are organic structures, so you should learn as much about that as possible. You'll need to know organic reactions because they are what your assemblers will be doing. On the other hand, organic courses are rather repetetive and it might be better to just read the textbook in the library. In addition to your chemistry texts I would recommend "Electron Flow in Organic Chemistry" by Paul H.Scudder, which will teach you the right way of thinking about reactions, instead of just memorizing them. The choice of other courses would be determined by your interests, which will no doubt take you down some specific path once you know more. I would only suggest that you take courses with lots of lab time. Lab time is when you really learn stuff. It is lots of fun. And, in case you don't plan to spend ALL your time studying, labs are a great place to meet girls
Before you decide to take lots of courses on quantum mechanics, consider the fact that it is almost entirely useless, and unusually difficult to understand. Molecular biologists don't use quantum mechanics. Most chemists don't use quantum mechanics. From personal experience, I can tell you that there is no quantum mechanics in the reaction flask. When you want to understand how a reaction works you don't solve the Shrodinger equation. You look at energy changes and you look at electron flow. Molecular orbital theory is probably the most abstract mathematics that you will ever deal with. Even that usually reduces to useful (and cute) pictures of electrons on shelves. MO theory will make complicated things simple, like, for example, making it painfully obvious why some CNTs are metallic and others semiconductive (look at benzene's MOs and try building a conjugation chain from one end of the CNT to the other). Furthermore, all quantum mechanical courses start with scary preambles like "on the atomic scale, the physics are different", "you can't know everything", or "atomic particles are not real, but just probability clouds". If you ask my opinion as a chemist, I would tell you that it is all a load of bullshit. When I look at a reaction, the molecules are real, the atoms are real, the bonds are real, everything is well located in space and stable, there is no uncertainty whatsoever (although in solution there is some randomness), and the laws of physics apply everywhere you look. So consider this before you study.
If you do decide to study quantum mechanics, I would suggest starting by looking at a practical application of how it is actually used. I recommend reading "Group Theory and Chemistry" by David M. Bishop for a hands-on experience of doing quantum mechanics for real data. You can skip the group theory stuff on the first reading and just watch where the results actually come from.
For mathematics, if you want to delve into the higher spheres of knowledge there, you should do more geometry. The Greeks had it right, because when you focus on geometry you see the real world and not just some variables in an equation that connect to nothing. If you study too much algebra and statistics, you tend to forget that your results should apply to something real, and you might start inventing theories where they do not, like quantum mechanics, where everything is fantasy, smoke, and mirrors. For the same reason, don't take statistics too seriously. Remember that anything based on statistics is necessarily a guess of a general trend. Don't fall into the trap of believing that what you are studying really works the way the statistics tell you, or you will suffer a "wavefunction collapse". Study symmetry. Most physics theories these days are based on group theory and point and space groups. Concurrently with the aforementioned chemistry application book you should be reading "Symmetry. An introduction to group theory and its applications." by Roy McWeeny and "Fourier Series and Orthogonal Functions" by Harry F.Davis, which are really all about the same thing. I would also heartily recomment "Visual Complex Analysis" by Tristan Needham, the subject matter of which will be completely useless to you, but be very educational and entertaining nevertheless.
To know how to tell your assemblers what to do, you will need to know about computer programming. Don't take courses for this; just buy a decent book on C++ and assembly language. Go for the older books which write code for slow old computers with limited memory, since your assemblers will be slow computers with very limited memory. A good book is "The Black Book of Graphics Programming" by Michael Abrash (one of the Quake programmers), which has many chapters on assembly programming and optimization which will teach you how computers work. That book also includes Abrash's "The Zen of Assembly Language" on CD, which will be quite relevant to you, since all assembler programming will be assembler programming (the name alone should tell you something about its relevance to nanotech
November 16th, 2004 at 2:50 AM
Principles for Nanoscience development
Since self-assembly and self-replication are the natures phenomena in natures self-regulation, we can perceive that these characteristics of nature can be taken as the basic principles for the development of nano-scale materials and nano-scale bio-robotics remote controlling. Hence all branches of the natural sciences are involved for the engineering of the devices in nanoscience.
November 16th, 2004 at 3:18 AM
Re:Principles for Nanoscience development
Well, that is not quite strictly true. Nano-scale bio-robotics falls into a category I would call "whole genome engineering". It could depend on self-assembly, or it could depend on directed assembly (as we now have both DNA and protein synthesis machines). Biology uses both — the E. coli cell wall which is effectively made of a single molecule of peptidoglycan is built using directed assembly not self-assembly.
As far as self-replication goes, it may be useful, but it is not necessary nor optimal. It is far more efficient to build a factory that cranks out things which do not have the ability (i.e. do not need to carry around the molecules, machinery, genetic programs, etc.) that are required to perform self-replication. Would for example you ask your car to reproduce itself? You can only drive one car at a time (unless you are extremely clever). Carrying around all of the machinery for your car to reproduce itself would make it much more expensive to operate. Sure you could copy it with a small nanofactory but even nanofactories have costs and production rate limits. Plus if everyone has a nanofactory then the value of an additional car is probably its scrap value.
I do agree than many if not all of the natural sciences are involved in nanoscience engineering. Thus the problem with getting a nanoscience education — the need to go for a wide education with selective depth in the most important areas.
November 16th, 2004 at 3:54 AM
Coherency on self-assembly and self-replication
We can consider the assembly and the replication are in the aggregate molecular level and also when there is chain of directed assemblies, that may of by the molecular environmental remote controlling.
November 16th, 2004 at 6:18 AM
Re:Coherency on self-assembly and self-replication
Not a bad point. I doubt we have a full understanding of what can and cannot be done by self-assembly. Or what may be more or less efficiently using self-assembly.
I also doubt we have a full understanding of the degree to which biology is using self-assembly vs. directed assembly. In which case it may be hard to determine when one should use directed vs. what one should allow to self-assemble. To the best of my knowledge there are no good constraints on such systems (self-assembling vs. directed assembling) at this time. And "Nature" only serves as a point in the phase space. In fact there should be an optimal assembly space for each physical construct. There may be more optimal assembly points. It is a question of finding them using the available technology that begs the question.
November 16th, 2004 at 9:22 PM
Guided or directed remote target assembly
On top-to-bottom approach, the quantifications of physical constructs are much difficult, since there is difficulty in the standardization of smallest construct to assemble with coherent super-constructs and so we may presume for a virtual standardization of smallest construct to proceed further on nano-scale material development. Another constrain is to assign guided molecular self-assembly to a remote target assembly as bio-robotics, since there is sequence of repeated procedures are needed to guide or to direct the remote target assembly.
November 17th, 2004 at 5:10 AM
Duality of matters
When we look into the quantifications of basic molecules, the standard model may need to be restructured for the development of nano-scale materials to get into a revised periodic table. Since the energy is the basic potentiality of matters on viewing the duality of matters for its mass, the assumption of pyrophosphate bond in relevant to the formation of ATP may get modified when new nano-scale materials are assumed, on the basis of energy conservation principles.
November 18th, 2004 at 4:18 AM
Re:Duality of matters
> Since the energy is the basic potentiality of
> matters on viewing the duality of matters for its
> mass, the assumption of pyrophosphate bond in
> relevant to the formation of ATP may get modified
> when new nano-scale materials are assumed, on the
> basis of energy conservation principles.
If anybody here understood this statement, please explain it to the rest of us. jayakar has the most incomprehensible writing style I have ever seen
November 22nd, 2004 at 10:09 AM
Nanotechnology
You could take a look at the curriculum for nanotechnology in denmark, several universities have both undergraduate and graduate education. Most of the information is avaiable in english. http://www.inano.dk http://nano.ku.dk
November 22nd, 2004 at 5:08 PM
Re:A few comments
I'm a physics PhD student at UC – Riverside in the Bartels group in Chemistry. I current have a master's in Physics. Ever since I heard about nanotechnology, specifically mechanosynthesis and the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (which is to my knowledge the only instrument that can currently due true atomic manipulation and imaging) I've been working to realize Feynman's and Drexler's dream of a molecular assember, since 1997. So, as an undergraduate to prepare myself at the University of Washington, I got degrees in Physics, Applied Math in Scientific Computing, and a minor in Chemistry with not such a great GPA 3.10. I would really suggest to you to have a powerful understanding of physics. As you probably know, all the other disciplines of science and engineering can be seen as subdisciplines of physics. If you choose to focus on chemistry or electrical or mechanical engineering you can do this in your graduate program. It is extremely difficult to go from the other disciplines 'up'. Even my girlfriend, who is a physical chemist at UC Irivine, finds it difficult to make the transition to chemical physics. Yet, I TA for physics and chemistry classes. So, get a degree in Physics take the full version of Quantum, E&M, thermo, statistical, classical, optics and really know your stuff. Now for the chemistry background I would really recommend general chemistry sequence and organic chemistry, P. Chem isn't necessary if you get a degree in Physics. And if you want to learn biology talk a professor into letting you take Molecular Biology or biochemistry (although I have no experience with these). In reagards to mathematics, in my experience, most even, experimental physicists are rather weak in this area, especially Americans. Don't allow your fears to rule your life, several of the greatest physicists were great mathematicians. And if you want to realize the dream of nanotechnology, the two most important things I've learned after 7 years of following the dream (check out http://www.chem.ucr.edu/groups/Bartels to see my research group, I'm sure you'll see which one is me). is patience and practice practice practice. (If it takes 5 or 6 years to get your BSs then so what!) Hope this helps, Robert
January 18th, 2008 at 9:31 PM
I’ve noticed many people talk about how chemistry is more important than biology in nanotech. Well I have a question for all of you you chemists – just what exactly are you trying to do with nanotech? Anything with a profitable motive in nanotech involves biological systems. Without an understanding of these systems you will not be able to positively impact anyones life or market your skills. Which is beyond the point that the philosophy, or ethics, of nanotech is very much up in the air, and I’m not 100% sure that it is a field in which those who care should involve themselves (at the same rate, maybe because of that, it is a field that those who care should disproportionately involve themselves).
February 17th, 2008 at 8:12 PM
Hi,
I thoroughly support designing a nanotech major. I am an undergraduate and majoring in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology and Mathematics. My research interest is nanomedicine. I had trouble finding appropriate classes that will help me learn about nanotechnology. I read articles, journals, and magazines and collect them for an informational blog I am planning to develop soon over the summer. Molecular Biology is important for understanding future applications of nanomedicine. I think one should take advance cell biology, chemical engineering, calculus-based physics, biomedical engineering classes to build a solid foundation in nanotech.
The reason why biology is an integral part of nanotech lies under its enormous potential in pharmaceuticals, medicine, and materials. It is important to have a multifaceted view of nanotechnology. It is going to diverse and expand to include several fields together. It is one of the most far reaching technological revolutions we have.
I think all of the classes you have mentioned will develop you into a powerful and prepared molecular nanotechnologist in the future. I think learning about DNA should be covered sufficiently in any molecular biology class. DNA arrays are going to be very hot over the next years.
Best of Luck to you. It is encouraging to see you are one of the many people venturing into nanotech as an undergrad…bravo!!!!
Payal!
September 18th, 2012 at 3:12 AM
[...] the Foresight Institute » Blog Archive » Designing a nanotechnology … [...]