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July 25, 2005
Dr. David Tomanek, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Michigan State University, June 15, 2005
Dr. David Lemberg: Our first guest is Dr. David Tomanek, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Michigan State University. Dr. Tomanek has been promoting nanoscience and nanotechnology with dedication throughout his life. His results on the electronic structure, mechanical, thermal and optical properties, as well as quantum conductance of nanostructures are described in several hundred publications and invited talks. His pioneering results in computational nanotechnology, in particular, in the field of fullerines and nanotubes, have been rewarded by a Fellowship of the American Physical Society.
Fluent in several languages, Dr. Tomanek has dedicated significant effort to strengthening international collaborations in the field of nanotechnology by organizing workshops and conferences, such as the upcoming Sixth International Conference on Nanotubes, to be held in Sweden. Welcome, Dr. David Tomanek.
Dr. David Tomanek: Good evening, David.
Lemberg: David, I think we are generally familiar at this point, with the basic concepts of nanotechnology. Can you tell us how deep an impact you expect the field to have on society, in general?
Tomanek: Well, it’s very hard to predict and to imagine the full impact nanotechnology will have, but I believe that we are living in the age of a nanotechnology revolution, and I believe the nanotechnology revolution will be similar in impact to the industrial revolution, which revolutionalized the world at the end of the 19th Century. We are just changing from the use of animals to the use of machinery, a very similar deep impact on the society we can expect from nanotechnology and its consequences.
Lemberg: And, although, of course, we can’t predict exactly, can you talk about some of the changes you expect to see in five or ten years?
Tomanek: There will be, definitely, fast evolutions in computer technology. We will be expecting self-diagnosing systems embedded maybe in a T-shirt, which will tell us about an upcoming danger of a heart attack. Medicine will have some significant advances with selective tools. The current tools are pretty crude. But, it’s really very hard to foresee the future.
Just imagine about fifty years ago, the laser was invented, and people didn’t…couldn’t imagine that maybe the biggest effect of the laser in nowadays life is the way we pay for the goods in the check-out counter in the supermarket, by scanning the bar code. So, it’s very hard to imagine what will be the most significant development in five, ten, fifteen years.
Sam Kephart: I can’t help but think that there’s an analogy here for sort of a tsunami in a positive way, and I almost feel like most of society is laying out on the beach enjoying the waves, and there’s this thirty-footer coming in that’s, literally, going to shake the foundations of how a lot of business, and business processes, and physical things are done. And, as a society, are we really prepared for this? I mean, I’m, obviously, in favor of it, but I have some profound questions about, you know, people that can’t even work their VCR yet, how are they going to handle an interface with nanotech?
Tomanek: This is definitely going to be a very important issue. I think that in the years ahead, it will be education and information, not products and materials, that will matter most. And, the countries with a high level of education and access to information will be the leaders in the world of the future.
Lemberg: David, you mentioned education and information as being critical going forward. It seems that, overall, in the United States, we have been falling behind in these critical areas.
Tomanek: That’s why I’m raising this topic. I believe that nanotechnology is, to some degree, a force, a democratic force that will be bridging the gap between those who have, and those who have not. Those who have not can invest in education, and are investing in education to a significant degree. We should not fall behind.
Lemberg: Can you expand a little bit? I know you have thoughts and concepts relating to education for children.
Tomanek: As a matter of fact, I believe that children are being discouraged from getting interested in technology and science. I believe it’s a pity. I believe most scientists will share my enthusiasm for research, for discovery.
And, we should excite the young generation for the adventure of discovering new processes. I believe that…look, let’s look at the generation of our fathers. The generation of our fathers played with toy soldiers, and yes, the current generation, instead, is playing computer games.
Now, the computer games are sort of simple-minded. They still have toy soldiers, they still are shooting at each other, and now, couldn’t we imagine a computer game that is doing with the same sound and visual effects, playing the world from the point of view of an atom, on the atomic scale, making an atomic scale molecule simulation of a chemical reaction? Wouldn’t this be an interesting game that could harness…that could, while the children are playing at an early age, that could get under their skin, a deep understanding, an intuitive understanding of atomic scale processes? I believe this is what we need for the next generation of scientists.
Kephart: David, obviously, you have profound knowledge in several related silos, but a fun question for me to you would be, what is your most favorite subject inside nanotechnology? In other words, if time and money were no issue, where would you be hanging out?
Tomanek: I would be hanging out, observing and trying to understand nature processes, which have been going on for a very long time, which we are completely unable to understand. They are self-assembled structures, like the Buckyball, which has captured the imagination of scientists and school children, alike. We still do not know why exactly, and under which circumstances it forms.
Second, these nanostructures, on the atomic scale are structures…behave very differently. Small carbon cluster may behave like a cluster like a small metallic system. It could behave like a piece of gold.
It could become a very powerful magnet. Quantum mechanics, together with the atomic scale and with the electronic structure on these scales, will play incredible tricks, which we can harness for the benefit of all. And, this is what excites me. There are surprises over surprises.
Kephart: David, I’m curious to know, along those lines, where do you feel this whole concept of intelligent materials will go, you know, where at the nanoscale, it’s not just a reaction, but there’s actually a little bit of heuristics, if you will, built into the nanoscale device or molecule that has some intelligence, and will either self-replicate or build into a more complex structure.
Tomanek: Well, I would say the so-called intelligence of a nanostructure, is just its ability to follow nature laws. You give it an impulse, you apply an electric shield, and the molecule will bend, or will twist. And, we can use this as an intelligence structure. We can call it an intelligence structure, but in reality, it’s only following nature laws, combined with a predictable behavior of a nanostructure that we, hopefully, can understand.
Lemberg: David, thank you. A few minutes ago, you’d mentioned quantum mechanics, and you know, we know that observing a reaction at the nanoscale will, in fact, perturb the system. Can you talk about your investigations with computational nanotechnology?
Tomanek: Thank you very much for raising the question. As a matter of fact, I believe that we are, in the sciences, we are at a stage where one particular science cannot solve all the questions, in particular, physics, chemistry, biology, and experiments cannot do it alone. They need support of each other. They need support of theory. We need to model the system on a computer. On a computer, we can understand…we can do a predictive calculation of how a system will react, and these calculations are based on our knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Now, does a system behave in that way? Probably. We will find out in the experiment that the system behaves in a different way. Oh, then, we will find out that we did not ask the right questions. Only a very intimate collaboration between a theory and experiment will bring us the level of understanding that will result in significant progress in the future.
Lemberg: And, I’m guessing that you would need to do such experiments on a super computer.
Tomanek: We are very happy to have access to the world’s fastest super computer, the Earth Simulator in Japan, Yokohama. We are using a significant amount of the computer cycles for the benefit of nanotechnology, and for the benefit of all. We are trying to understand what experiment was unable, because it has a finite resolution in space. We cannot observe atomic scale processes with a resolution of, let’s say, sub-nanoseconds. This we can do very well on a computer, and the complementary results from a computer simulation, and from the follow-up experiment, will give us, hopefully, a deeper level of understanding.
Sam Lephart: Along those lines, David, I’m curious to know, to what degree, when you’re doing your computational research, do you have to deal with the Vicissitudes of Chaos Theory, because on the one hand, when you get ultra small, everything affects everything else, and you’re trying to make a predictable, reliable determinant etching, if you will, of what this nanoscale device is going to behave like. So, how do you resolve those two?
Tomanek: As a matter of fact, you are touching on a very important issue in quantum mechanics, can we make an absolutely precise measurement? Can we know exactly in what system, in what state a system is? We cannot. There is the Heisenberg Uncertainty, there is a limit to our amount of knowledge, and there will be a limit in the amount of predictions we can make about a behavior of a system. This will be true for anything happening on the nanometer scale that is subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Lemberg: David, we’ve got a couple of minutes left. I want to make sure we talk about the upcoming conference on nanotubes in Sweden, the Sixth International Conference. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tomanek: The nanotubes are a very interesting material. They’ve been discovered…as a matter of fact, nanotubes has been observed a very long time ago, already in the early 70’s, and have been reported, but really, they have been popularized by Sumio Iijima in Japan in the early 90’s. And, since their discovery, there has been a boom of science and of research in these systems, trying to utilize them for their strength. They are, maybe, 100 times stronger than steel. They are light. They have a very high melting temperature, maybe 4,000 degrees Celsius.
They are chemically inert, and they can act as ballistic conductors that mean, they conduct electricity without losses, or they could be insulators, they could be used for electronic devices. Finally, nanotubes, to our knowledge, at least, and there are investigations going into this, are not toxic. So, they seem like the material of the future, and the amount of publications, and the percentage of research in nanotechnology going into nanotubes, has been increasing rapidly.
We established…I thought it would be good to bring together the community experimentalists and theorists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and our first conference was in 1999 on the Campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing. Since then, the conference almost doubled each time. Each time, we had twice the number of interested participants than we could accommodate.
Once, we even had to reject half of the participants because there was no space. This time, we hope that with 400 participants in Sweden, we can accommodate most, and we can represent the whole field. We are especially interested in sharing the excitement in research with the students.
It’s not only senior researchers, it’s also the young generation.
Lemberg: David, thank you very much for a wonderful conversation. We would love to have you back.
Tomanek: Thank you very much.
Lemberg: Our guest is Dr. David Tomanek, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Michigan State University. Stay with us on Science and Society.
Posted by David Lemberg at July 25, 2005 12:12 PM