title: A specific nanomanufacturing challenge.
abstract: For a science to become a technology, a certain level of control has to have been established over the way items are fabricated for manufacture and use. Here we first consider the challenge of making and using a LEGO(®) brick scaled down by a factor of 10(n) for n = 0-6 in each spatial dimension, i.e. from millimetres to nanometres. We consider both the manufacture and the subsequent properties of the nanobricks that pertain to their use in constructing and dismantling structures. As n increases, the ability to use fails first, to manufacture fails second and to fabricate fails last. Applied to the vast literature in nanoscience, this process emphasises the unmanufacturability of most nanoscale artefacts.
authors.affiliation: Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0HE, UK 6. Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, Electrical Engineering Division, Department of Engineering, 9 J J Thomson Avenue, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0FA, UK. The MacDiarmid Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Kelly
authors.forename: M C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Dean