Now with the latest advanced chips having digital switch sizes down to 5 nanometers (nm) you can appreciate how much progress has been made in the miniaturisation of electronics. It is worth on Wikipedia looking up the “International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors” or ITRS to see the progress on miniaturisation from 1971 getting down to 5 nm in 2020 for the size of these digital switches.
Use this link to see the Wikipedia page for ITRS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International
Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors
Now you realise these digital switches are now smaller than
the Coronavirus 2 Virus which has a range between 60 nanometers (nm) to a
maximum diameter of 140 nanometers (nm). Whilst the length of the spikes that
surround the coronavirus sphere can vary from 9 to 12 nm. So we are now able to
successfully manufacture something smaller that the virus. But in both cases it
is very difficult to comprehend how small both these switches and the virus are
in the real world. Now both of these can be viewed using electron microscopes
along with many other small pieces of matter. This is called science undertaken
at a nanoscale level. The exciting aspect to viewing the world at a nanoscale level
is everything in our world starts to look exactly the same. So both inorganic
and organic (life supporting) structures start to look identical. At the
nanoscale level we move down to seeing the smallest building blocks of our
world. Importantly to this author it will start to unify all the separate
sciences under the one heading of Nanosciece and its application through
Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is focussed upon using real things that measure
between 1 to 100 nanometers. Without a doubt it will be information technology
that proves the most effective technology for the unification of the other
sciences which has evolved its own name as Nano Convergence. But before we
consider this unification or convergence it is important to get an appreciation
of the size of a nanometre.
A nanometer is a unit of length equal to one billionth of a
meter. (0.000 000 001 m) and is used to express dimensions on an atomic scale.
For example a helium atom is 0.06 nm which is a reminder that you can have many
things that are even smaller than a nanometer. Now everybody appreciates a
nanometer is very small but it is difficult for us to picture exactly how
small. To give you some perception note a coin like a penny is roughly 1
millimeter thick so imagine you could shrink yourself down to being just 1
nanometer tall then that 1 millimeter coin sat alongside you would look like it
was a 100 miles tall.
Now in the organic or living world the DNA in the cells of
our bodies is between 2 to 3 nanometers thick but up to several millimetres
long so it has the proportions of a long piece of fine thread curled up inside
the chromosomes. Atoms and water molecules are smaller than a nanometer. Whilst
the wavelength of visible light ranges from approximately 400 nanometers at the
violet end of the spectrum to approximately 700 nanometers at the red end.
So in terms of the size of what we can manufacture we are not
far off being able to make digital life but establishing the digital patterns
that can generate the chemical patterns to make us humans it is going to
require far more complex digital processing. This is where the use of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing techniques is going to accelerate our
progress.
For a more detailed analysis of SARS-CoV-2 read this excellent PDF
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MoJ4T32z3ZLPDEQDawxzUf3A43ZWXfBbrCTv_HvaKqo/edit?usp=sharing
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