If you tune in to today’s show, you might hear guest host Joe Palca talking to Felice Frankel and George Whitesides, co-authors of No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale.
The point of their book is to help people visualize concepts in nanoscience.
So here’s a collection of images from the book. If you’re listening to the podcast, enjoy. If you’re listening to the show live, feel free to call in with questions about specific pictures.
Frankel was charged with the task of putting together the images. Because you usually can’t photograph nanoparticles — they’re smaller than the photons of light needed to hit objects when taking a picture — many of her photographs are metaphors.
Like this picture of a cascade that’s supposed to represent electron levels:
["Quantum Cascades" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
Or this picture of an apple with a square reflection, that is supposed to show that things on the quantum level aren’t always what they seem:
["Quantum Apple" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
People who do take pictures of tiny particles sometimes use this tool, an atomic force microscope:
["Feeling is Seeing" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
Technology is one field with an obvious nanotech connection. Smaller, faster equipment, like this microreactor, have been key for technological advances:
["Microreactor" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
Frankel tries to illustrate the flow of data. You see the flight pattern of commercial aircraft (top), compared to a map of bit flow in the internet (bottom):
["The Internet" Image Credit (top): 'Flight Patterns' by Aaron Koblin 2009. Image Credit (bottom): Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University.]
Here you see quantum dots, or tiny pieces of inorganic material, attaching to structures in a cell:
["Quantum Dots and the Cell" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
Different views of a sponge skeleton:
["Elegance of Simple Animals" (collage) Image Credit: Joanna Aizenberg and Felice Frankel.]
The skeleton in full:
["Elegance of Simple Animals" (double spread) Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
Nanoscience is also going to help shape the future of energy. Here you can see Frankel’s picture of a fuel cell:
["Fuel Cell" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
And her shot of a solar cell:
["Solar Cell" Image Credit: Felice Frankel.]
The scribblings that trace the paths of particles in a nuclear collision:
["Nuclear Reactions" Image Credit: Felice Frankel (based on original black and white from CERN).]
For more about the book and the authors, check out Frankel’s website here and the Whitesides lab website here.
Decades ago researchers using field emmitters produced images on the angstrom scale of tungsten atoms as well as field ion mircographs that were quite spectacular (Mueller at Penn state – if I recall sa well as others in the early development such as Dyke et al. Linfield research and later at Field Emmission corp.).
These I think were the earliest nanoscale images.
“Nuclear Reactions.” Very reminiscent of one or more paintings by Paul Klee.
Fascinating show. Love the images. Helps me to visualize and comprehend the unimaginable. Regarding anything ‘quantum’–I’m very interested but mostly in the dark. But I’m trying! Listen to scifri every week and only wish it were on the air more often. All I want to know is ‘the truth’ and only through science will we find it. If it’s in fact ‘findable’.
Wish you would REPEAT numbers of times, the websites you refer to over the radio. Once is not enough.
Thanks,
Susan
Joe – I spent a lot of time trying to follow your suggestion to log on and see the nano pictures, but since I hadn’t heard your web address properly, I couldn’t get there . Kept trying things that sounded like what I thought I’d heard; finally stumbled on ‘art’ and ultimately, after a clue from what I was hearing, ‘arts’ and found — PICTURES! How about either spelling what you’re sending us to: ARTS — or/and REPEATING it, which I didn’t hear you do even at the break. It could be SO helpful…especially when just ‘scifri’ website doesn’t give a clue. Thanks for hearing me, I hope.
Felice Frankel’s images really come alive when they are combined with George Whitesides prose – which verge on the poetic at times. A series of short juxtapositions of text and images form the book are available here: http://2020science.org/2010/01/18/no-small-matter-taster/
I’m reminded, of course, of Richard Feynman’s famous lecture “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” Here is the blurb from the web:
This transcript of the classic talk that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was first published in the February 1960 issue of Caltech’s Engineering and Science, which owns the copyright. It has been made available on the web at http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html with their kind permission.
I liked Rick Freeman’s comment (above). I tell people all the time to start paying attention to science news, especially astronomy and quantum mechanics. They may understand just bits and pieces of it, like me, but it’s awesome to live in an age of such discovery about God’s creation. Maybe we’d hear less nonsense about how old we’ll be in heaven and which of you’re two wives you would still be married to. I’m sure we’ll never “find” God through science, but it’s a quantum leap forward over what religions have given us.
This is a bit off topic – but one of these pictures got me thinking:
what causes the paths of particles in a nuclear collision to spiral?
Matter is supposed to move in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. Anyone?
My first reaction to “Nuclear Reactions” was also “That looks like a Paul Klee etching!” Very interesting broadcast. Thanks.
Hi. I am reading an incredible book which in part describes a ‘likely’ future impact of nanotechnology and it is very amazing. I don’t mean to give anything a ‘plug’ but the book is The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I love Science Friday and for me the easiest way to find it the first time was npr.org -> shows -> Science Friday.
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Kirk,
The spiral (in a bubble chamber) is due to a magnetic field acting on a charged particle (Lorentz force). The wikipedia page isn’t very good, but hyperphysics has an ok explanation: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/magnetic/forchg.html#c1
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The picture that i found the most intersting was the cascade one. The reason why was because if you dont understand the different levels of electrons then you can look at that picture and have somebody explane it to you and it will be easy to understand.
I would like to know why the Hubble Telescope is never pointed at Earth?
Thank You,
Debbie Earle
Thanks, Dave. That makes sense. All the magnets that are driving the particle faster and faster must exert a strong field even in the collision chamber..