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Economic Analysis of the Nanotech Future
nweaver writes "Economic Historian and Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong has created an analysis on his Web Log on the economic implications of Nanotechnology. His observations are based on what previously happened with the Industrial Revolution (and other economic shifts in general) and using this to speculate what Nanotech will do to the economy: who wins (technical/knowledge workers), who loses (manufacturing), and what changes (costs of products)."
i have worked a bit in the field of nano-decorated surfaces. it is impressive that one can make little nano-sizes arrays of magnetic dots on some substrate . this as so small, that one can view them as single particles which switch homogenously. hence you can study the interactions of little magnetic particles in arrays and do experiments which are very close to theoretical models, such as the Ising model. why should you care? because this nano-patterns seem to be interesting for exchange biased systems. and these seem to be interesting for the recording media industry. but why should you care... this is too geeky anyways. this guy (AKA Prof. Kai Liu) at UC Davis does some interesting research with nanostructures... cool pics and some explanations...
The potential benefits of superconductivity are very large. Take New York city, for example. Some months half the electricity they buy is used pushing the other half across hundreds or even thousands of miles of high-tension lines. What would be the financial benefit of saving 50% on your electric bill for the entire city of New York?
Superconductivity is a pipe dream, in that even that absolutely enormous potential savings, multiplied by all the similar situations elsewhere in the world, isn't motivating anyone to build a working superconducting transmission system and save that enormous amount of wasted power. If it's feasable, why hasn't a demand that large produced a result? The theoretical benefits of superconductivity certainly ARE large enough to matter - ergo, the limitation must be practice, not theory.
As a lesser example, Superconducting Magnetic Levitation was supposed to enable a generation of high speed trains that could compete with the aircraft industry. The Japanese just set a train speed record of 585 Km/h. They did it with a non-supercoducting system. Why did they do it the "hard way", if superconducting technology is more than a laboratory curiosity?
Who is John Cabal?