Nanotechnology

SUNY at Albany hosts the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, a center, perhaps the center, of nano tech research in the US today. It has collaborative arrangements with 250 companies at work in the field, including IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, Novellus Systems, TI, and DuPont, just for starters.

The October 2011 issue of ENTREPRENEUR MAGAZINE credits Alain Kaloyeras, whose many titles include that of Chief Executive of aforesaid College. The magazine portrays him as the academic entrepreneur who built this program, and tells us a bit about how he has done it, a story that beings in 1988, when he was a "newly minted Ph.D. in condensed matter physics," and had to decide wherther to take a jub with SUNY, at that time not an impressive physics-and-engineering place.

(Jason Daley gets the byline on the story, part of a broader feature called Gurus & Grads. )

Here is Kaloyeras' page, at www.albany.edu

Although I'm hopelessly out of my depth in matters of high science, this has never stopped me from expressing opinions,as you can see here, for example, or here, or here, where I linked nanotechnology to my own personal "cosmological heresy."

It is possible that sentient beings play a part in the big picture of the cosmos.  Consider these points:

1) the great advantage of the Big Bang theory over any effort to revive the Steady State theory is that the former seems directly consistent with the 2d law of thermodynamics.  Everything has to be running down to a heat death, and the Big Bang and consequent expansion gives us a vivid mechanism for this.

2) Maxwell, in his thought experimemt of a little demon that redirects molecules, was hypothesizing a way to beat the Second Law.

3) Nanotechnology sounds a lot like the creation of Maxwellian demons as a reality.