Size Matters

In 2000, Bill Joy, the chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, published his now-famous anti-technology manifesto entitled “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us” in Wired magazine. In it, he outlined technologies that he feared might spell the end of our species, major among which was nanotechnology. Although Ted Sargent does not mention Joy in his new book The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology Is Changing Our Lives, he is clearly responding to Joy’s doomsaying, cheerleading all the way.

This is a brief book: thin, with loosely packed pages (and with irritating pull quotes every second or third page; it is a book meant to be read sequentially, not a magazine to be browsed, and these blocks of text seem nothing but filler). But perhaps the size of the book is appropriate given its subject: nanotechnology is the science of the very small, devoted to the manipulation of individual molecules, choreographing, as the title would have it, their movements and...