Prodding the cosmic fabric with nanotechnology

Abstract

Scanning probe microscopes have become vitally important instruments throughout nanotechnology. It has been discovered recently that these same tools can address a much more fundamental question that takes us back to the ancient Greeks and their philosophical discussions regarding the nature of ‘the void’. The concept of the atom as a building block of matter, proposed by Leucippus and Demokritos 2,500 years ago, requires as part of the package a void in which the atoms move. In fact it was probably the philosophical problems associated with having a void that killed off the ancient atomic theory, which was a tragic lost opportunity, as the modern version didn’t re-emerge until the work of John Dalton 2,300 years later.