Critique of Nanotechnologie: A Debate Nanotechnology is a new engineering skill which promises great power by manipulating matter at the atom level. To date, the debate over its consequences (solution or problem?) have assumed its inevitability. Critiques of the proposed science - can it actually be done? - have been nonexistent in the public discourse. The following critique of nanotechnology doesn't address all the questions this technology brings up, but what a relief to have any technical challenge. Simson Garfinkel, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, starts off this four-part debate by challenging the underlying technical details this new power is based on. Eric Drexler, Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and a key visionary of nanotechnology, offers his rebuttal. Kevin Kelly (Whole Earth Review)
To Howard Craighead, director of the National Nanofabrication Facility at Cornell University, Nanotechnology is a science that uses the chipmaking techniques of the microelectronics revolution to produce devices of increasingly smaller dimensions.
To Rick L. Danheiser, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nanotechnology is a word that describes synthetic organic chemistry - a science which seeks to place atoms in precise and complex arrangements in order to accomplish exacting goals.
To K. Eric Drexler, an author and visiting scholar in the Computer Science departmental Stanford University, Nanotechnology describes a technoiogy of the future - a technology based upon self-replicating microscopic robots controlled by tiny mechanical computers, capable of manipulating matter atom by atom.
Who is right? Everybody and nobody, really, because "nanotechnology" isn't a scientific term. Nanotechnology is a mind set, an ideology, a way of solving big problems by thinking small-thinking very small.