Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes. Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It’s 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. In the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We’ll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of physics. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise. It’s worth pointing out that the word “nanotechnology” has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research.Nanotechnology comprises technological developments on the nanometer scale, usually 0.1 to 100 nm (1/1,000 µm, or 1/1,000,000 mm). A possible way to interpret this size is to take the width of a hair, and imagine something ten thousand times smaller. To compare different orders of magnitudes of lengths between 10-9 m (meter) and 10-8 m (1 nm and 10 nm). 1 nm = 1 nanometer = 1000 picometers = 10 Ångströms is roughly the length of a sucrose molecule, calculated by Albert Einstein. 1.1 nm — diameter of a single-walled carbon nanotube 2 nm — diameter of DNA helix 3 nm — flying height of the head of a hard disk