Nanocosm: Nanotechnology and the Big Changes Coming from the Inconceivabley Small

From Publishers Weekly
Atkinson, who makes his living as a consultant explaining technology to business types, ostensibly wrote a book debunking the myths about nanoscience, a trendy research field that "a fringe of boosters" claims will enable us to develop machines at the molecular level. But that subject is largely lost in a maze of digressions, as Atkinson veers from pretentiousness to chattiness and spends a lot of the book discussing everything except nanotechnology: world politics, the march of time, old jokes and even his interview subjects' workout routines. He offers a sophomoric couplet mocking the author of the most successful book on nanotechnology, cursorily dismissed as an overzealous fantasist, and an inept science-fiction passage attempting to imagine a nanotech-shaped world a decade or so down the road. Atkinson's personal observations mar the narrative: he makes fun of a Swiss scientist's accent and a Japanese woman's inability to pronounce her r's clearly. Every once in a while, there's an attention-grabbing scientific revelation, like a description of how Buckminster Fuller's architectural achievements have turned out to be mirror images of carbon atoms, but these occasional insights are simply not worth slogging through the rest of this book.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Physics Today
[the book]is a delightful romp through the landscape of nanotechnology,detailing the author's discover of the fact&fiction of this fascinating realm."


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Since the beginning of the industrial age, many machines have grown steadily smaller even as they have grown more powerful and complex. Nanotechnology, based on the science of the infinitesimally small, takes technology beyond most popular definitions of reality, to a realm of astounding possibilities. Nanocosm reveals a spectacular view of the immediate future of nanotechnology and its applications in medicine, computing, manufacturing, engineering, and countless other arenas that affect our world, redefining how we work, play, and live. Will nanoscale transistors enable computers to outstrip the combined power of all the supercomputers currently in the world? Can gold nanoparticles bond with -- and destroy -- cancer cells? Will gargantuan elevators lift satellites to their orbits? The possibilities for the not-too-distant future are astounding. But nanotech is already real: It makes tennis balls last longer. It makes paints and coatings stick better. It makes pants impervious to coffee spills. It's made car tires stronger for decades. And in 2003, President Bush signed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, a $3.7 billion grant that represents the largest federally funded science initiative since President Kennedy established the space program. As with any phenomenon, nanotechnology has both its naysayers and its zealots, by turns clouding scientific truth with dismissals, prophecies, and pipe dreams. Nanocosm distinguishes fact from fantasy, possibility from hype, and perspective from fear-mongering, to present an emerging reality far more thrilling than any fiction.


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