Popular Science Review - Soft Machines

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Review - Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life - Richard A. L. Jones

This is a fascinating book on a fascinating subject - it only gets three stars because of two flaws, but first the good part.

The subject is nanotechnology, making things in the world of the very small, the world where a human hair is a as wide as a house. Jones does not cover the whole span of nanotechnology - there's very little, for example, on the nano particles that make up the vast bulk of the current nanotechnology, nor on the applications of plasmonics - the interaction between light and electrical phenomena, particularly around the use of very small apertures. Instead he focuses on the original concept put forward by Eric Drexler in the 1980s (and inspired by a talk given by Richard Feynman in the 50s) of building machines on the scale of atoms.

The message of the book - and it's a stunningly important one to anyone attempting to work at this scale - is that we can't take our picture of how the world works normally and shrink it. For instance the film Fantastic Voyage (which Jones endearingly if oddly refers to as "'Fantastic voyage'") which no less a writer than Isaac Asimov novelised pictured a sub-microscopic submarine dashing around the circulation of a patient to fix some medical problem. Unfortunately at this scale water is so viscous that a conventionally propelled sub would never get anywhere, and surfaces are so inherently sticky that it wouldn't get far before being stuck permanently in place.

Instead, Jones points out, we should follow the logic of biological constructs, those soft machines of the title, and make use of the oddities of the nanoscopic world, rather than fighting them. That's great, and the argument is made very well with excellent illustrations of nano-work. But there are those hiccups. Firstly this isn't popular science. To be fair, OUP the publisher never claimed it was, but point out it's readable by a general audience. That's probably true, but it feels much more like a very well written introductory textbook for first year university students than popular science. This is most obvious in the way Jones fails to follow through with the stories. He often states facts, leaving the "and so what" that a popular science writer would fill in to dangle precariously.

Secondly, the book suffers from poor editing. It jumps backwards and forwards without the flow of a well written popular science book and some of the text is repeated almost word-for-word (sometimes three or four times). This perhaps reflects the textbook nature - the habit of telling them, then telling them what you told them to reinforce the message, but it doesn't sit well in a book you should want to sit down to read. (There's also some rather unfortunate timing in that Prince Charles is slated for his condemnation of nanotechnology, which reflects the early miss-release of information rather than Charles' now published stance on the issue, which is much more complex.)

So where does that leave us? It's not really popular science, and has a few irritations in the editing - but it's still a very good book on a deeply engaging subject that is well worth reading - we just hope a good popular science book on the subject will come along too.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Martin O'Brien

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