now for the micro/foward from oddmusic

ATOMIC SCALES

Striking Notes of Progress on the World's Tiniest Guitar
By GEORGE JOHNSON
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It was weird enough when NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently came
across a black hole, 250 million light years away, humming a bass note
57 octaves below middle C. Now scientists have found an accompanist to
hold up the treble end.

Cornell University physicists reported last week that they had used a
laser beam to pluck the strings of an invisibly tiny silicon guitar
just 10 millionths of a meter long. Each string of the instrument is
about 50 nanometers (or billionths of a meter) wide - 100 atoms thick.
Human hearing tops out at tones that vibrate at about 20,000 cycles per
second. The high-pitched sound of the nanoguitar twanged forth at 40
million cycles per second, putting it 17 octaves above what human ears
take for music.

Using the same kind of technology that etches the tiny wires and
components onto computer chips, the researchers at Cornell's NanoScale
Science and Technology Facility have also constructed a nanodrum from a
crisscross diamond mesh and a nanoxylophone with tiny diamond bars.

These "nanomechanical resonant systems" demonstrate human dexterity
pushed to the extreme, an attempt to revolutionize manufacturing and
medicine (though perhaps not music) with artifacts as tiny and
efficient as the atoms that compose the universe.

Practical applications aside, making nanothings is the ultramodern
equivalent of building a ship in a bottle or carving the Lord's Prayer
on a grain of rice - a feat surpassed this summer when a husband and
wife team working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
inscribed the New Testament in 24-karat gold typeface on a silicon chip
five millimeters (less than one-fifth of an inch) square. Each letter
was the size of a single bacterium.

The micro-Bible is enormous compared with the nanoguitar, each string
of which is thousands of times thinner than a single human hair, so
small that it begs the question of what one means by a "thing."
Scientists can say with some confidence that a single atom does not
qualify, consisting, as it does, mostly of empty space, a vast nothing
separating a dense nuclear core and a shimmering periphery of
electrons. Even an atom's substance - if it can be called that - is
elusive, the particles hovering in a quantum state where position and
momentum can be described only in terms of probability.

Put trillions of atoms together and you get something solid like a real
guitar, a chunk of matter you can hold in your hands. The nanoguitar,
impossibly tiny as it seems, also exhibits some of the dependable
properties associated with thinginess: you can pluck it and it plays.
But it hovers near the brink, at a poorly understood threshold where
quantum effects begin to dominate.

When the National Nanotechnology Initiative, formed in 2001 to
encourage research in this new science, used a tiny carbon needle to
spell out its Web address (www.nano.gov) in letters just seven
nanometers wide, it pushed even deeper into the in-between world,
sometimes called the mesoscale, the murkiest of scientific frontiers.

People have, of course, been manipulating atoms all along, but only in
what Ralph C. Merkle, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology
and nanotech enthusiast, called "great thundering statistical herds."
Manufacturing today, he has written is "like trying to make things out
of Lego blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the
Lego blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really
snap them together the way you'd like."

If nanomanufacturing comes of age, something as tiny as a nanodrum or
nanoharp might be mass-produced for use as extremely sensitive
detectors for ultra high-frequency waves. Scientists have recently
demonstrated infinitesimal nanotube thermometers and nanobalances
capable of weighing a single virus. All this may foreshadow a day when
doctors use nanocapsules to carry medicines, a few molecules at a time,
to precise locations in the body, and nanorobots to crawl through the
bloodstream and repair cells.

In the meantime this all makes for good science fiction. Last year
Michael Crichton published a thriller, "Prey," in which scientists
develop a swarm of flying nanobots that can flock to a distant location
and form a giant camera, beaming images back to the human masters. The
vermin escape, of course, and being not only invisible but also
artificially intelligent and very fecund, they threaten to multiply
beyond control.

This is much scarier than resurrected Jurassic dinosaurs, and some
scientists are already considering how to ensure that the danger never
becomes real. In his newest book, "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's
Warning," published earlier this year, Dr. Martin Rees, Britain's
Astronomer Royal, includes berserk nanorobots among the technological
threats to the future of mankind.

Other scientists think nanotech may be the savior. In addition to being
very tiny, cylindrical molecules of carbon, called nanotubes, are far
stronger than steel. In September, Los Alamos National Laboratory
sponsored a conference on how nanotubes might be used someday to build
a "space elevator" 60,000 miles high. Cheaper than firing rockets, this
could provide the first great leap off the planet. With nanobots
nipping at their heels, a few brave souls could escape and explore the
solar system and experience first hand the music of the spheres.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/weekinreview/09JOHN.html?th
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I posted this here 10 days ago.

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