At Argonne National Laboratory in the Center for Nanoscale Materials, great strides in science are being made. Perhaps, it is there that we will begin to solve some of the problems that have plagued man since the dawn of the Industrial Age. We are now in the beginning stages of developing the basic science that can turn ordinary materials into extraordinary materials of great value. This is how finally we can maintain the health of Planet Earth, and meet our most basic needs.

Nanotechnology with all its promise and all the hype will likely be used first to make promising new materials. Perhaps, one of the scientists at Argonne will discover the ultimate material, the Golden Fleece of Materials Science – a substitute for purified silicon made from ultrathin amorphous oxide and a superior semiconductor.

We could never solarize the world with expensive and highly purified silicon. This material is rare and comes from just a few places on earth. There simply is not enough to go around, but there may be a substitute that is becoming available to us now with advances in materials science taking place at Argonne – ordinary amorphous glass.

Ordinary amorphous glass can be thought of in terms of the din of traffic noise – an irritating jumble of confused and random structure. Semiconductors on the other hand are really quite ordinary except that the structure of ordinary material is rearranged into a symphony of great beauty. These are akin to nature’s fine crystals formed under great heat and pressure, and some of the most precious and valuable of all earthly things as valuable to us as gold.

The future of the semiconductor industry probably does not lie in bulk semiconductors, but more likely in ultrathin oxides between ½ nanometer and five nanometers in thickness. These oxides because of the transition into the dimensions of the quantum realm below nine nanometers, begin automatically to take on a crystalline structure. These are more akin to semiconductors than ordinary amorphous or non-crystalline oxides. It should only be a simple and intelligent manipulation to purify these materials and add the impurity atoms to these ultrathin oxides in order to make a tunnel glass.

In an electron accelerator, we acquire energy from an electron by accelerating the electron. At high velocity, electrons gain energy. There is however another way other than a massive accelerator to accelerate the electron.

Scientists have been aware for many years that an electron tunneling or accelerating into a vacuum gains energy. Instead of using a massive electron accelerator, we could use the science of Nanotechnology to construct a tiny sphere of tunnel glass from ultrathin oxide in order to accelerate an electron and derive useful energy from it. Any vacuum, no matter how pure, contains some errant atoms and this may be one method of tapping the elusive zero point electromagnetic field.

The universe is indeed postulated to be in the form of a polarized vacuum in the shape of a sphere, and experiments are ongoing to validate this hypothesis. Perhaps we can imitate the structure that we perceive as nature’s grand design and solve our most pressing problems. The science of "Symbiotics" to coin a new word, or simply taking a jumble of ordinary material, and turning the ordinary into a great symphony is our bright hope for the future. A whole new industry may come from this one endeavor alone.

The likelihood that scientists such as those at Argonne will make use of the emerging science of Nanotechnology to solve our energy problems and many other pressing problems is quite possible.

Our future may be indeed very bright.

From the desk of Ralph Randolph Sawyer