When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.
In the process of making nanomaterials, we learned that with the electronic density of states, the phonon electronic properties and everything change at the nano-level. So the thermoelectric properties would also be changed.
Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers. But why not take a noninvasive approach? I've been working and trying to think and invent a way to do this for a number of years and finally happened upon it and left Facebook to do it.
And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one.
I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.
It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.
Administrators and scientists are excited by buckyballs for their own sake, and if they turn out to have practical applications, so much the better.
A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.
