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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or has the term "nanotechnology" really inflated in meaning in recent years.

When I think of nanotechnology I think of actual designed automatons at nano scale, not anything just containing nm sized particles.

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If "containing nm sized particles" is all something needs to do to be considered nanotechnology, everything is nanotechnology. This is getting ridiculous.

Then what would you call [purposefully] generating nano sized particles and mixing them in a specific ratio to add to glass to create a colour change effect that is highly sensitive to contaminants?

It's not simply chemistry as it's using [apparently] engineered physical effects of light transmittance.

I'd call it either chemistry or applied physics. Probably lean more towards applied physics, as chemistry doesn't concern itself with light.

I mean, in what way is this engineering? Metal particles emit characteristic glows when struck by light. Romans ground up the metal and mixed it in with glass. Now the glass does it too. Voilà.

If I'm reading the article right, this is analogous to me making lemonade by mixing sugar and lemon juice into water, granting the water the flavors of sugar and lemon with nanometer-scale particles (citric acid and sucrose). Is lemonade now the tastiest form of nanotechnology?

Yes, yes it is.

It may seem like commonly known applied physics today, but you can bet 1600 years ago it was a pretty amazing engineering fete to create a glass that automatically changed colors when different liquids were put in it. 1600 years from now I'm sure our successors will be calling the quantum computers we're toying with simple applied physics instead of engineering as well.

The argument is the use of the word nanotechnology. They were not engineering things on the nano scale, they were just mixing ingredients together. If the definition of nanotechnology is incidentally using nano scale particles, then the word is essentially meaningless because everything would be nanotechnology.

The grievance is that bloggers and journalists throw these buzzwords around for attention, and their articles end up being ridiculous, and if you're picky about definitions, outright false.

But despite appearing primarily in popular culture as extremely small robots, nanotechnology simply refers to the scale of the technology, so actually, this is by definition, nanotechnology. It is actually the popular representation of nanotechnology which has always been too specific.

That's what 'nano' means, but 'nanotechnology' is a set phrase with a specific meaning. You have to be manipulating matter at that scale, not simply using particles that size. Smoke is not nanotechnology.

Smoke is not nanotechnology

Well, there goes my proposal for an ingenious plan to apply nanotechnology to the field of communications. I was thinking of calling them "smoke signals".

it was even going to be in the cloud...s

Sadly, I've read pieces where obsidian blades are labeled as nanotech as well.

In other news, cranberry glass is actually kind of cool and helped win this guy a Nobel Prize in 1925: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Adolf_Zsigmondy

Agreed. This is more along the lines of chemistry.

A lot of chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration. It's a follow-the-money sort of thing. Turns out, chemists were working in the nano scale all along. Who knew.

> chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration

Clever way to put it… although how much was the president’s doing directly, or the consequences of trends within one of the various government agencies that he just rode the wake of, might not be clear without some citation.

I think the technology part in this case comes from the fact that it had a real world application, albeit an aesthetic one.

It is entirely unclear if it was purely aesthetic. The article points out that the color changes are extremely sensitive to small changes in ratios of different elements in the containing fluid. It is entirely possible (although I agree it is a stretch) that the color would change if the drink it contain was contaminated with a poison.

So what was it? Was it a cool glass that changed color? Or a gift from the Gods that showed the true nature of its contents? If it is as sensitive to change as the article suggests I could see passing it off as the latter.

My question then is why I can't get a wine glass today made this way? :-)

> My question then is why I can't get a wine glass today made this way? :-)

Likely for a similar reason that glass was mostly forgotten by the West during the early Middle Age and we completely lost how to make Damascus steel. Information was not preserved in a permanent multigenerational manner, either by intent or oversight, that we can still access today.

>why I can't get a wine glass today made this way //

How many thousands of dollars do you want to spend?

Sort of depends on the effectiveness :-) But more seriously looking through my daughters old glaze catalogs there doesn't seem to be a glaze with a mix of gold and silver particulates, much less one with "exact proportions" hinted at in the article.

Given the effect of being different colors when different types of liquids were in the cup seems so novel, I found that surprising. I have no idea if I can write to the glazing company and ask them to mix me up a special glaze, but if it recreated this effect I am sure it would be popular with folks.

I think it may be because gold and silver melt too close to the temperature at which glazes are usually designed to flow. For gold the melting point is ~ 1060 deg C (Earthenware firing temperatures). I'd expect the gold might tend to coalesce rather than maintaining the sizes required to produce the effect in the OP.

Also I don't know about applying glazes to glass, only ceramics.

This is due to politics. If the chief editor of Journal A likes the prefix nano, you'll see nano in the titles. Then journalists read the abstracts, write a story and proliferate the use of the word.

This is not _exactly_ how it goes, but you get the point.

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