The Hindu Business Line : To those who don’t say ‘na-na’ to Nano

Seriously, apart from see-yes-eee’s Sunita, we have heard few voices saying ‘no’ or ‘na’ to Nano. There are many sighs, though, of the eagerly waiting, with cards and cash in hand to swipe or swap for the little wonder that Tata will anyway be rolling out on roads in due course. Meanwhile, how about a quick research into ‘nano’?

The word, a prefix, means ‘extremely small,’ says Encarta. Which explains the name for the popular model of Apple’s entertainer. Mathematically, nano is one billionth or 10 to the power minus 9. Nanosecond (ns or nsec) is a common measurement of read or write access time to random access memory (RAM), explains SearchCIO-Midmarket.com.

“The measure Admiral Grace Hopper famously handed out foot-long lengths of wire to students to illustrate how far an electrical signal can travel in a nanosecond.”

A 1959 word, coined from Greek ‘nanos’ meaning ‘dwarf,’ states www.etymonline.com. The prefix is traced to the 1940s by www.worldwidewords.org. “It was used first in measurements of small electric currents (nanoamps), or powers (nanowatts), small volumes of liquid (nanolitres), and the like. Whimsical computer scientists have since invented nanoacre, for an area about 2mm square on the surface of a microchip.” At the current real-estate prices, you may have to think of nano-houses.

“Be with you in a nano” means you really will be free shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by “in a jiffy,” says http://dictionary.reference.com. Jiffy, said to be originally thieves’ slang for ‘lightning,’ is the duration of one tick of the computer’s system clock.

In the hierarchy of metrics, milli is one thousandth; micro, one millionth; pico, one trillionth; femto, one millionth of nano; and atto, one quintillionth. Possible names for future car models?

The Centre for Science and Environment should be happy with www.infoplease.com. Because the site does a spelling check for nano and says, “Hmmm… that doesn’t look right.” It suggests ‘some possible alternate spellings,’ including nani, nan, mano, nana, kano and NATO.

A must-see is the disambiguation page for nano on http://en.wikipedia.org. The list has Fatos Nano, Prime Minister of Albania; Mohamed ‘Nano’ Mahmoud, an Egyptian football player; and also – a novel by John Robert Marlow, a C++ framework for developing high-performance applications for Mac OS X, a star communications officer in the fictional Star Trek universe, a text editor originally designed to be a clone of Pico, and a brand of virtual pets during the height of the fad.

“As a nanotechnology scientist how do you feel about the use of the word in products ranging from iPod to cars?” I ask T. Pradeep, Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Sophisticated Analytical Instrument Facility, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Nanotechnology, for starters, is a branch of engineering that deals with the design and manufacture of extremely small electronic circuits and mechanical devices built at the molecular level of matter, as http://whatis.techtarget.com defines. Pradeep’s team developed the world’s first nano-material based water filter about a year ago.

“I am concerned about the use of the word ‘nano’ in anything new,” he responds. “However, in the nano car context, I suppose this name was chosen because of the meaning of nano, ‘dwarf.’ For a small car at a small price, the use of the word nano is appropriate.” May be this will also help people become aware of nanotechnology, Pradeep hopes. But then a product is designed with hope, he concludes. Big hopes, really.

MuraliDe@gmail.com

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