Mesotechnology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article requires authentication or verification by an expert.
Please assist in recruiting an expert or improve this article yourself. See the talk page for details. This article has been tagged since November 2006.

Mesotechnology is a term sometimes used in relation to the interface between the everyday macroscopic world, and nanotechnological devices which may be invented in the future. The difficulty stems from engineering a reliable, usable interaction between devices that operate on size scales so many orders of magnitude apart.

The prefix meso- comes from the Greek word mesos, meaning middle, hence the technology spans a range of length scales as opposed to nanotechnology which is concerned only with the smallest atomic scales.

It describes very well phenomena on the atomic to nanoscale while classical Newtonian Mechanics describes the behavior of objects on the microscale and up. However, the length scale in the middle ( Although the term itself is still quite new, the general concept is not. Many fields of science have traditionally focused either on single discrete elements or large statistical collections where many theories have been successfully applied. In the field of physics for example, Quantum Mechanicsmesoscale) is not well described by either theory. Similarly, psychologists focus heavily on the behavior and mental processes of the individual while sociologists study the behavior of large societal groups, but what happens when only 3 people are interacting, this is the mesoscale.