SCIENCE CONCEPT

Science Concept or Phenomena

Science Concept or Phenomena

Identify a specific scientific concept or phenomenon for which our understanding has changed over time?

The emergence of nanotechnology has raised expectations of a new unity of science. Nanoscience as the science of “Shaping the World Atom by Atom” should, following these expectations, integrate the former classical disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and the engineering sciences. Obviously, these projections challenged the philosophy of science and philosophical epistemology in order to uncover the underlying assumptions of those expectations and to question the conditions of their validity. The hypothesis could be traced back to a naturalistic perceptive of atoms as something related to bricks or stones in the macroscopic world. “Shaping the World Atom by Atom” would then mean building up diverse structures from atoms in an analogy relating building systems from macroscopic elements like bricks (Grunwald, 2007).

Explain how scientific discoveries have changed our understanding of that scientific concept or phenomenon over time?

Scientific discoveries of the 19th century, typically involved collecting and categorizing large volumes of information about the world, and from that information to, then construct explanations that are theories, for why the world is the way it is. These discoveries have changed our understanding of the scientific concept or phenomenon over time. Roughly, three different positions have been expressed thus far. First, there are assumptions of a new “Baconism” arising. Nanotechnology, in the attitude of “Shaping the World Atom by Atom” deduced as a new optimism in making everything technically possible. In addition to the size-oriented definition, emergence supposed to give substance to nanotechnology: it is not solely the size of the objects, but also the size-dependency of properties that matters. Although the questions of whether or not there is any justification for attributing the term emergence to technological systems and what size-dependent properties we are talking about remain controversial, emergence used in two different ways throughout the recent debate—depending on whether one moves up from the microworld of quantum physics to the mesoworld of the nanoobjects, or moves down from the classic macro-world to the mesoworld (Grunwald, 2007).

Most interestingly, these functionalities are very different from those of bulk matter; they have no equivalent in the macroscopic world. Two kinds of size-dependent effects can be distinguished: (1) spatial or surface effects give rise to a high fraction of atoms or molecules at a surface (surface-to-volume ratio) and can induce a breakdown of the concept of statistical thermodynamics; and (2) quantum effects show discontinuous behavior due to the completion of shells in systems with delocalized electrons. The latter are governed mainly by the laws of quantum physics, whereas the laws of traditional sciences no longer hold in the nanocosm. So-called quantum dots seem very promising, for instance, in nanoconductors, where they provide distinct energy levels for application in molecular electronics and quantum computing. According to M. Roco and W.. Drawing on this distinction of the two effects, an adequate definition of nanotechnology has become a matter of ...