Trawling though the nether regions of the web, we came across this Australian site whose name well not repeat to avoid trouble with some of the over-sensitive profanity filters that some recipients of the email version of TNTlog have to negotiate.
Suffice to say that the page describes itself as “A nano-apostate webpage dedicated to the slimey cancerous flim-flam-barnum-and-bailey-charlatan hype scam fraud of the Great God “Nano” – Deity of Nanotechnology.”
We were flattered to see TNTlog was the major source of contributions to the section on Speculative Nano-Innovation, but the rest of the site made us chuckle, with comments such as
Professorial advice received is that it is best to err on the side of caution and assume all science done with the label of “nano” is crap. (e.g., If the science was any good, it would not have required the word “nano” to be associated with it), and the definition nanopatterned biosilica (Comment: apparently pores in diatoms can no longer be called pores in diatoms).
The site also links to a paper entitled Nanometer-Scale Kitchen Appliances and the Physical Limits of Toastability. which contains some familiar conclusions about the future.
The conventional wisdom currently falls into two camps: either that nanotechnology is the wave of the future, or that nanotechnology is probably just a big scam. According to this research, the inescapable conclusion is that nanotechnology is both the wave of the future and probably just a big scam, and that this fortunate combination of unlimited promise and inherently ambiguous results should generate enough controversy to fuel the engines of science for years to come.