| |
 |
|
|
Science Forum Index » Nanotechnology Forum » Review: Ratner and Ratner's _Nanotechnology And Homeland De
Page 1 of 1
|
| Author |
Message |
| John S. Novak, III |
 Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2003 7:42 am |
|
|
|
Guest
|
[ NOTE: This is a potentially inflammatory topic with a strong social /
political component. Please exercise discretion in follow-ups, avoid
flame-wars and politics, and try to focus on technical issues rather than
social issues. -- /gdp ]
Review: Nanotechnology and Homeland Security
Daniel Ratner, Mark Ratner, 2004
(Note: The official publication date is 2004, but I picked it up on the
shelves about two weeks ago and reviews had been appearing for some
weeks before that.)
(The following review is also archived here:
http://www.humblest.net/archives/shih/000025.html#more )
Two Line Review: Hype. Potentially useful hype, if you're in to that,
and interesting reading if it's telling you things you don't already
know.
_Nanotechnology and Homeland Security_ has gotten at least one glowing
review, foremost among them (in my mind, at least) at Howard Lovy's
"Nanobot" blog, which points to another longer review at the
electronic version of the print magazine, "Small Times."
http://nanobot.blogspot.com/2003_11_02_nanobot_archive.html#106789094846753055
http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=6913
I'm not quite sure why.
I like reading popularized science type books, truth be told. They're
almost as easy to read as a novel or a biography, even if I keep my
engineering and science BS and oversimplification detectors on. If
I'm lucky, they'll give me a decent bibliography to go with the broad
overview of the subject I'm reading about, so I can dig in with
greater detail if I want.
Unfortunately, a lot of nanotech popular books contain an awful lot of
hype, since nanotechnology is so nascent a field, so much more
theoretical than applied, and so much in the public eye. It can't
possibly be difficult to get published writing about nanotechnology,
right now. (Any publishers who would like to prove me right, please
drop me an e-mail.) This is, in my opinion, one of those books-- a
lot of hype, because it can sell.
It's a thin little book, to begin with-- one hundred forty or so
pages, which themselves are fairly small without even the benefit of a
small typeface. There are some nice color plates in the center of the
book, but they're not used to good advantage. As far as I can tell at
a glance, each color image is a duplication of something already in
the book in black-and-white elsewhere, and even some of the images
chosen mystified me-- a graph with a simgle line on it, for instance,
is not helped by a color image. Why bother?
The book is technically divided into six chapters, but the first is an
introduction of only a few pages, and so is barely worth mentioning.
The first broad black mark against the book comes in chapter two when
Ratner and Ratner repeat Smalley's critique against strong molecular
manufacturing almost verbatim. They even mention the phrases "sticky
fingers" and "fat fingers" in order to describe Smalley's basic critique--
that atoms are too small to be manipulated individually, and that
the "fingers" needed to do so are both too sticky and too large to do so.
They raise similar critiques about command, control, and communication
structures, power sources, etc.
Hard core believers in mechanosynthesis would probably froth at the
mouth at this. I am not going to spend the space of this review
arguing with or supporting their points. However, it is impossible
for me to believe that Ratner and Ratner are ignorant of the
semi-controversy over these claims, and it annoys me to no end to see
even a popular book put down the authors' definitions without even
presenting the other side. I think Drexler and Merkle have done a
more than adequate job making and making public their case. Omitting
it entirely makes the Ratner brothers look like they're hiding from
the issue.
They would have done far better to present both sides of the argument,
which at a popular level takes no more than three pages, or so, and
then said, "We're now going to talk about nanostructures and advanced
microbiology applications-- that other stuff is for some other book."
Chapters three through five are essentially application based
chapters: conventional battlefield, terrorist defense, and
economics/ecologics, respectively. These chapters aren't bad, per se,
but they're also not great. They can really be summed up in the
following few sentences: "We're going to have lighter, stronger
materials and fuels. We're going to have better sensors, and we're
going to network them. We're not going to hurt the environment as
much, and we'll be able to clean up after ourselves and the evil
terrorists much better. Oh, and we're going to make lots of money at
it."
None of these statements is untrue. To their credit, they at least
try to give some reasonably insightful examples of these ideas in
action, and some of the precursor but functioning technologies that
are in the pipeline, so it's not all hype. On the other hand, they do
fall prey to the, "It's got nanotubes in it! It's better!" trap, more
than once, and a number of their examples were so vague that I was
left scratching my head when I tried to figure out what they were
actually describing at a physical level, and how nanotechnology was
really helping.
And, not all of these statements require nanotechnology, per se, in
order to come true. While nanotechnology is going to come in very
handy for making, say, very small, very cheap chemical and biological
weapon sensors for battlefield use, I simply do not believe that I
need to invoke nanotechnology in order to network those sensors
together at a platoon or company level. I need only cheap
conventional semiconductor technology to do that. Likewise, I do not
need nanotechnology to develop unmanned air or ground vehicles, nor to
network them together. The UAV field is doing just fine without
nanotechnology, and though it will doubtlessly be aided by
nanotechnology, it can still proceed without it. Likewise the
unmanned ground vehicle programs, once they get rolling.
The sixth and final chapter is about ethical, societal and
geopolitical concerns. (That's the chapter heading. I didn't see
much about geopolitics in there, which is getting to be another vastly
overused term.) Given the previous three chapters' unabashed lovefest
for nanotech applications, this was probably a good chapter to have
for balance, if nothing else. Pointing out that technology is amoral
is a good and necessary thing, because it is not very hard at all to
point out that advanced technology can be misused by our own
governments as much as by the evil terrorists. I'm not sure if I
agree with their prescription for some of the problems-- a suite of
global organizations designed to track the technology-- but that's a
political subject for another time.
Now, the book isn't all bad. If nothing else, it's a nice collection
of technical applications (even if it is hype-heavy, in my opinion)
centered on mostly military and defense-related themes. I also
suspect that the less technically-inclined one is, the more helpful
and interesting this book will be. For myself, I was wondering why
the book got such a breathlessly glowing review over at Small Times,
and, well, I'd kinda like my twenty five bucks back.
--
John S. Novak, III jsn@cegt201.bradley.edu
The Humblest Man on the Net |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| |
|
Page 1 of 1
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
The time now is Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:35 am
|
|