SCIENTISTS exploring nanotechnology’s frontiers aren’t quite as pioneering as might be thought, according to a science historian who says the notion of atomic manipulation can be traced back almost 100 years.

Speaking at the opening of the Art in the Age of Nanotechnology exhibition at John Curtin Gallery, Dr Colin Milburn said the term was first defined in 1974 by Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi and was usually associated with early proponent Dr Eric Drexler.

Although seen by many as a 'new' science, according to Dr Colin Milburn the concepts behind nanotechnology are not recent inventions / Image: Istockphoto

However, he said there were much earlier references to the ideas of moving and building with atoms to create new realities.

“Whenever I tell people I work on the history of nanotechnology they say ‘that can’t be very hard. It hasn’t been around a very long time’.

“But that’s both right and wrong.”

Dr Milburn is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California Davis and has trained as a science historian, literary theorist and molecular biologist.

He said scientists often pointed to an early reference to the idea of atomic manipulation made by physicist Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965.

Dr Feynman’s suggestion was that man could build a pair of smaller mechanical hands that would in turn build another pair, and so on until the hands were small enough to manipulate an atom.

Although this was a remarkable suggestion, it wasn’t unique. The idea of tiny, atom-shifting mechanical hands had been raised in a 1954 science fiction story written by Robert Heinlein.

Yet according to Dr Milburn, writers in the 1940s and 50s suggested similar ideas. So where did nanotechnological thinking begin?

Dr Milburn said he uses as his definition “a visionary linkage between seeing and touching the nanoscale as if with our own hands, as if with our own eyes and within that, imagining the possibility of a radically different future”.

On that basis, it must come after atoms stopped being thought of only as theoretical possibilities, with a series of short stories by a British author written in the 1910s as one very early reference.

In one story, a scientist builds a microscope that sees into an atom, where he spies a beautiful woman with whom he falls in love. He figures out a way of shrinking himself and lives out his life with her at the atomic scale.

“This is not a technical vision of how one is to accomplish nanotechnology. It is not an argument for a scientific possibility,” Dr Milburn said.

“But the basic point here is that atoms are no longer untouchable and as such they enable us to build a new future.”

He said nanotechnology had always captured the imagination and the potted history showed how it was an idea suspended “…somewhere between present and future, somewhere between technological immediacy and speculative vision, between science and science fiction”.

“This mixture of fiction, technology and art that appears everywhere in the discourse of nano — this is not some kind of problem or pathology that nano needs to be cured of,” he said.

“I would contend ‘nanovisions’ have been essential for nanotechnology’s prosperity.”

Dr Milburn will be speaking at a free public symposium to accompany the exhibition, from 9.45am at the gallery on Sunday.

Also part of the exhibition is a free lunchtime talk by Venerable Ajahn Brahmavamso Mahathera, Abbot of Bodhinyana Buddhist Monastery, Serpentine, who will speak on February 17 about the development of a mandala at atomic scale. Bookings can be made on 9266 4155 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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