Knowing Success When We See It

In this chapter we look at some fundamental reasons nanotechnology represents a virtuous circle, in which every development enables additional progress, rather than sending us down a long and costly road with no real destination.

But just as fad is too general a word for how things might go wrong, nanotechnology is also so big an umbrella that it's bound to harbor both realities and fantasies beneath it. The signal-to-noise ratiothe proportion of reliable information to badmay always be less than we'd like, because the upper bound on what nanotechnology could someday mean is a compelling vision.

Moreover, as we learn to do specific things, and as that knowledge makes the move from concept to practice, it will be natural for people to devise more specific labels for what they're doing successfully. When people are trying to attract resources to present-day efforts, they want to distance themselves from speculative visions of what nanotechnology might someday enable. Paradoxically, this need of researchers to define their own niches could make it seem as if the term nanotechnology has vanished from practical discussions.

The more ways that nanotechnology succeeds, the sooner this could happen.

Disappearance of the word would not mean, though, that nanotechnology was a fad. We can't equate the success of a technology with the ubiquity or the longevity of its label. Some technology labels come and go, whereas others survive for decades: We do well to recognize that a label sometimes disappears through success rather than failure.

The labels that hang around forever may describe what we merely wish we could inventfor example, "perpetual motion." Other labels fade from use, though, precisely because the thing they describe has become the mainstream. We can already see, for example, the beginnings of the disappearance of the adjectives in cellular phone, digital camera, and perhaps, in a few more years, hybrid car.

To today's teenagers, the first item is just a phone; to their younger brothers and sisters, the second is just a camera. And by the time a child born tomorrow has learned to drive, the third will just be a car. Will it seem quaint, in 2020 or perhaps as soon as 2010, to say that a product incorporates nanotechnology components or that it's built using nanotechnology methods? Will this term seem as dated as a label on a 1960s or 1970s radio that proudly proclaims it to be "solid state," trumpeting its use of transistors rather than tubes?

Yes, in all likelihood it will.

Nanotechnology is not a fad, because it is a trend: It's being adopted, not defensively by firms afraid of being left behind, but aggressively by companies that see what it can doand by communities of research and application that are meeting long-felt needs through nanoscale control of ingredients and processes.

Even if nanotechnology does have its roots in the singular vision of a Richard Feynman or a K. Eric Drexler, that tree quickly leafs out into branches that extend into every industry. One recalls the conversation from the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which an adult counsels a newly minted college graduate that the one word that matters is plastics: Those who saw the new things that plastics enabled, and did them, have most likely outperformed those who merely focused on the materials themselves. So it will be with nanotechnology: Those who apply it will achieve greater returns than those who merely enable and deliver it.

The nanotechnology components of finished products such as flat-panel displays will represent a fraction of the product's value; far more significant will be the radical reduction of the up-front capital cost of manufacturing such devices, lowering barriers to entry and thus changing the entire landscape of that marketplace.