Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.
I remember being fascinated by ants and wasps and other bugs when I was a kid. I'd set out a Coke can and stand back 20 feet and use my telescope to watch wasps land on it.
Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.
The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.
