If you’ve been alive for a couple decades or more, you’ve probably noticed how things are becoming more and more miniaturized. Phones that used to be the size of a brick are now almost paper thin and barely bigger than a credit card. These devices are not just phones, but pocket computers that are more powerful than machines that used to take up all the room on your desk. Throughout recent decades, scientists have been developing techniques for manipulating and creating smaller and smaller objects. It has gotten to the point where we can even manipulate individual atoms and molecules. When it gets down to that fundamental level, it’s called “nanotechnology.” Moving individual atoms around is a pretty amazing accomplishment, but why is it a big deal for science or for regular people? Nanotechnology has enabled a lot of advancements in technology already, which we’ll talk about shortly, but first let’s take a look at how nanotechnology began. How it all got started ...
How do you know what is real? For example, how do you know that you’re not dreaming right now? Whether you’re awake or dreaming, what you experience is just a simulation constructed by your mind based on various stimuli received by your sensory organs. As the field of physics evolves, our concept of reality keeps changing. Mere decades ago, we thought our entire universe consisted of the stars we could see within the Milky Way Galaxy, but large telescopes have revealed that our galaxy is just one of a trillion or more. As we become able to look more closely at matter, it begins to act very strangely. The tiny particles that make up the objects we see are able to move in two directions at once or exist in two places simultaneously. What are the smallest possible bits that matter can be broken into? We now know it’s not atoms. Is it quarks, or is it one-dimensional vibrating strings that exist within extra dimensions? There are many questions and very few definiti...