A WEIRD quantum effect could come to plague designers of micromachines, say
scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey. They have found that a phenomenon known
as the Casimir effect can make parts of a microscopic see-saw move
spontaneously.
Engineers will have to take the Casimir effect into account, they say, or
else the revolutionary molecule-sized machines now being planned could come
unstuck. But there’s a plus side too: the effect could be harnessed to form a
nano-scale spring.
Nanotechnology is an emerging field in which scientists hope to build
machines that have parts just a few thousand atoms across.…
