Nanotechnology and Its Interface with Automotive Industry (original) (raw)

Although scientist have long been working with " nano' size entities, the birth of the nanotechnology is commonly considered when Richard P. Feynman, a Noble Laureate, gave his famous lecture entitled, " There's Plenty of Room At The Bottom. " In this lecture he stated that the entire encyclopedia of Brittanica can be put on the tip of a needle and in principle there is no law preventing such an undertaking. He then challenged the scientific community and set a small monetary reward to demonstrate experiments in support of such a miniaturization. This was addressed by the Northwestern University researchers using a nanotech tool called Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). The term nano refers to a reduction of size or time by 10-9. As such a nanometer is 10-9 meter. A human hair thickness is about 50 micron (i.e. 50x 10-6 meter) in size, meaning that a 50 nanometer object is about 1/1000th of the thickness of a hair. To give the readers a feel for the order of magni...