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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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