The annual British Association meeting is the main science popularisation event in the UK, and not surprisingly nanotechnology got a fair bit of attention this year. The physics section ran a session on the subject yesterday morning. First up was Nigel Mason, who organised the physics part of the meeting this year and thus could give himself the best slot. He’s an atomic and molecular physicist who does scanning probe microscopy; his talk was a standard account of nanotechnology from the point of view of someone who’s got a scanning tunneling microscope and knows how to use it; from Feynman via the IBM logo and quantum corrals to some of his own stuff about imaging DNA. Next was Mark Welland, who runs the Nanotechnology Centre at Cambridge University. Once he’d calmed down after the first talk, which had upset him in all sorts of ways, not least by talking about Drexler in what he thought was an insufficiently critical way, he talked about his group’s work on silicon carbide nanowires, which if they do nothing else have produce some of the prettiest images to come out of current nanoscience. Then it was my turn. As Mark Welland said, making his excuses for leaving early, “I know what you’re going to talk about because I’ve read your book“.
Harry Kroto, Nobel Laureate for his co-discovery (with Richard Smalley) of buckminster fullerene, was talking about nanotechnology in the chemistry section in the afternoon, but I didn’t get a chance to see it as I was roped into a rather tedious panel discussion about how the public perceives physicists. The final event for me was an appearance in a discussion event compered by the (excellent) BBC radio science journalist Quentin Cooper. This brought me the chance to share a platform with a poet, a paleontologist, and the government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir David King. We also got some free beer, though to Sir David’s horror this was bottles of (american) Budweiser rather than pints of bitter. So I got a final chance to make my nanotechnology pitch, though Quentin Cooper was rather more interested in trying to prise an unwise comment from the famously undiplomatic King. He happily confirmed that he still thought that global warming was a bigger threat than terrorism, he didn’t deny the suggestion that he’d received a rebuke from 10 Downing Street for saying this in the USA , where it’s language not thought suitable for a servant of the government of a loyal ally, and he was smilingly gnomic about who he wanted to win the US presidential election.
The BA is all about publicity, so it’s worth asking how much interest this attention to nanotechnology stirred up. For my part, I think my talk got a good reaction, I signed the first copy of my book for a stranger, I did an interview for Radio New Zealand, and got the approval and interest of one of the BBCs best science journalists. And I now know who’s reviewing my book for Nature (Mark Welland). But I don’t think the subject really caught fire. Maybe a rather febrile summer of nanotechnology coverage has left media people starting to be a tiny bit bored with the word.