Week 8: Nanotech + Art
Nanotech + Art Nanotechnology studies and manipulates materials in the nanoscale. It was discussed by Richard Feynman in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" in which he highlighted the "enormous potential" for development in the field of nanosciences (Feynman 1). Since then, we have seen this potential be explored in many disciplines including developments in semiconductors, dyes and pigments, and nanomedicine. Many of these advances have depended on novel approaches to design and manipulate nanostructures, making the involvement of art in the field indispensable. It is hard to believe what you can't see. The nanoscale is impossible to see, but can be imaged using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) created by Binnig and Rohrer in 1981 (Chen 573). STM uses a sharp probe close to the surface of the specimen being imaged, and uses electron interactions between the tip and the specimen surface to scan it. This produces a grayscale image which is converted t...