Nanoscience and Me!

    

         
                                                         

    Hello! My name is Will Darnell and I am a rising senior at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky! I am a Biology Major and Psychology Minor and I hope to one day become a Clinical Psychologist. My hope is to one day work with children with disabilities. I have two goldendoodles, Skye is on the right and Aeli is on the left! 

I am currently enrolled in a course called Nanoscience that is taught by Drs. Johnson and Sly! I have created this blog as a way for me to spread my knowledge about the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology as I progress through this course! I honestly decided to enroll and take this course because I had basically no idea what nanoscience even was and after I did some research it sounded very interesting to me and I feel like I will be able to learn a lot! I am very interested in medicine and the advancements that can be made in medicine through the field of nanoscience! I am at the conclusion of the first three days of this course and I have already learned so much and still have so much to learn! I personally feel like I have a lot of questions and an even increased excitement for what is still left to come! 

Nanotechnology is the science, engineering, and technology that is conducted at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers. It is the study and the application of extremely small things that can be used across different science fields such as chemistry, biology, physics, materials science, and engineering. I am reading, “Size Really Does Matter; The Nanotechnology Revolution” by Colm Durkan. The example that he used to help us understand just how small a nanometer is completely astonishes me! He states that, “the world is approximately 100 million times larger than a football (American soccer ball), which is in turn 100 million times larger than a buckyball.” A buckyball is a hollow spherical molecule composed of a large number of carbon atoms. The active layer of a buckyball is made of carbon molecules that are 1 nanometer in diameter. I still can honestly not really wrap my head around just how small that is! 

We did a lab experiment this week where we were asked to make a rough measurement of the size of an atom using only a ruler, a balance, a periodic table, and Avagadro’s number. We were finally able to get a number that was very close to the actual size of an atom, which has an average radius of 0.1 nanometers! It was crazy to have been able to calculate and then see that an atom is that small and that we are talking as well as learning about things that are as small as an atom! I also learned some of the history of physics prior to the 20th century and many of the important people during this time like: Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Newton. Another very important person to mention is Richard Feynman, who was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and many other things. Richard Feynman gave a talk called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” where he laid the conceptual foundations for the field that is now called nanotechnology. He imagined a day when things could be miniaturized with huge amounts of information that is encoded onto increasingly small spaces and machinery that could be made considerably smaller and more compact. 

I am very excited to post to this blog as well as have the opportunity to show and explain all that I have learned and experienced in this class as it progresses! I can not wait to see what this next week has in store for us and I am very excited to report back!