Exploring the smallest of things with Peter Forbes

This month we chat to Peter Forbes, co-author of NanoScience: Giants of the Infinitesimal Tell us a bit about NanoScience: Giants of the Infinitesimal. The book began with my co-author Tom Grimsey and his Giants of the Infinitesimal project, together with his colleague Theo Kaccoufa. Tom and Theo set out to make the nanoworld visible thought kinetic sculptures that mimic processes in the nanoworld. The book takes this further by showing how self-assembly can produce both the intricate functional structures of life and technical assemblies with novel mechanical, electrical, thermal and other properties. In technical nano, graphene of course is to the fore because it has novel properties in almost every category. The book is not only concerned with the potentially dramatic applications of nanotechnology in materials science, computing, photonics, energy, desalination etc – it seeks to show through its illustrations the beauty of the nanoworld. Many nanostructures bear a striking resemblance to the contemporary architecture of figures such as Santiago Calatrava and indeed the nanoworld is an influence on architectural form. The creativity of nano is growing apace: in Joanna Aizenberg’s work at Harvard, one-pot nano reactions can now produce elaborate structures that resemble flowers: the beauty of the nanoworld has not been revealed on this scale before. What made you tackle this area of science? I have always been fascinated by the nanorealm. Its spaciousness is staggering: as Richard Feynman, the prophet of nano, put it: “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”. My hero is Lucretius, the classical Roman poet, who speculated on the atomic theory and used ingenious examples from everyday experience to guess how intricate the world of the very small must be. As Feynman said, nature works its magic at the nanorealm: the proteins of life are complex nanostructures. So my interest in biological nano led to my first popular science book, The Gecko’s Foot, in 2005. My co-author Tom Grimsey read this and wrote to me about Giants of the Infinitesimal. After a couple of visits to Tom’s Aladdin’s cave of a studio down in New Cross, I realised that we had much common ground in both art and science. That was four years ago: NanoScience: Giants of the Infinitesimal is the result. How did you approach writing this book? The quantity of research in the field of nano is staggering – for the book we deliberately cherry-picked the most promising techniques for applications and those that are most intrinsically fascinating and beautiful. As with any co-written book, we both have our favourite areas: Tom, as a sculptor, is interested in polymorphic form and the mathematics behind it. I am especially interested in biological nano. We divided the chapters but we agree on the basic touchstones: our veneration for figures such as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and Richard Feynman. Tell us about the relationship between art and science – are they really that different? There are key thinkers, such as Leonardo, Galileo, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and Primo Levi, for whom art and science were one culture. Morphology, the science of form, for example, has to be interesting to both scientists and artists. Until very recently, artists had more to say about form than scientists but now we’re getting to understand pattern-making and shape-making in nature there is obviously more common ground. I have been especially interested in camouflage as an area in which science, art and the practice of warfare come together (my book Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage). Another meeting point – one between the nano and macro world – is that wonderfully fertile pattern-book of forms in the nanoworld. There has been a real explosion of late in popular science books – what do you think is behind this? Science is currently immensely fertile in so many areas. The subtlety and strength of modern analytical techniques means that questions that were once idle armchair speculation, such as the origin of life and the processes of embryology, are now real, burgeoning sciences with hard data and plausible theories. DNA sequencing to map human evolution and migrations; food residues and pollen analysis to map the origin of agriculture and animal domestication; ice core analysis of past climates – all these are giving a solid record of both the earth’s history and human evolution and prehistory. These are issues of interest to every human being and science writers are bringing these stories into the wider world. [caption id="attachment_39128" align="alignright" width="200"] Peter Forbes[/caption] If you had to choose the most important application of nanotechnology, what would it be? There can’t be a more important application than that of producing liquid fuel from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. Nature achieves this trick via an immensely complicated piece of nanotechnology. The technical version will certainly be simpler but it will be a great triumph when it finally succeeds. It will also solve our two biggest problems at one fell swoop: it will both replace declining fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions. Science is now joining up the dots at an astonishing rate: life as a process is essentially the reduction of carbon dioxide to the plethora of organic compounds that give life its substance and energy. It began when carbon dioxide reduction was first achieved and the future of humanity now depends on learning new technical ways of achieving it. We have a copy of NanoScience to give away - see our competition here