Reducing Nanotechnology to "Vaporware"

POSTED BY: Dexter Johnson / Mon, August 30, 2010

I have to confess to getting more than a small chuckle from a recent blog entry from Scott Locklin, who
reduces the entire enterprise of nanotechnology to 25 years of charlatanry.
The criticism takes two forms. In one, the idea of labeling the surface and colloidal science
nanotechnology is a bit bogus. Secondly, the Drexlerian vision of nanotechnology he characterizes as
little more than science fiction.
On the former characterization, he will probably get little more
than a shrug from the chemists and advanced material scientists
he seems to be assailing. But I imagine the latter critique of
Drexler and molecular manufacturing (MNT) will garner him
relentless harangues, if my experience with simply discussing the
subject, never mind criticizing it, is any indication.
[Editor's note: This paragraph had to be changed to reflect my
mix up between Laclan Cranswick and Scott Locklin.] Locklin has
even provided a link to Laclan's Cranswick's website, the name of
which is not repeatable on this blog (according to the website
Cranswick passed away in January of this year) Cranswick's site
offered critical views of nanotechnology at least since 2005 (when I first became aware of his work) .
The site even made a few references to some items published by the firm I work for that expressed a fair
amount of skepticism towards nanotechnology.
Now my viewpoint on these objections of Locklin is a bit more tempered than his, albeit the name of
this blog is Nanoclast. As far as finding it a bit wrong to call advanced material science or chemistry by
the term nanotechnology, this argument has been offered innumerable times before. And as
appealing as it may be to think that this change in nomenclature is the result of some marketing
conspiracy, the term does help to focus what is at work here.
Nanotechnology is not just chemistry and advanced material science, it is a zoo of disciplines that have
to be brought together at times to develop technologies that are enabled by the bizarre behavior of the
world at the nanoscale. This can involve biologists to chemists from physicists to electrical engineers. It
is a word that becomes so broad at times that it nearly begins to lose all meaning. But we do need
something to delineate this research from merely chemistry because it is not just chemistry. And the
term "nanotechnology" is as good as any other.

Now as for his attack on Drexlers work, one would do better to look at Drexlers more recent work and
views on atomically precise manufacturing rather than to continue to focus on his now quarter-centuryold PhD thesis.
I like Locklins point of view, and its one that I have shared more or less on occasion, albeit not to his
degree, but I think the criticism of nanotechnology in its entirety needs to become somewhat more
sophisticated if it is to move beyond just broad humor, funny though it may be.