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Atomic engineering


The term "Atomic engineering" appears to be first coined by Theodore von Kármán, where he wrote

"And now it seems we are at the threshold of the new atomic age. I do not know whether or not this is true, but certainly we shall have "atomic engineering" in the fields of power and transportation. Are we prepared for the problems involved?"

So atomic power (and what may generally be considered to be in the discipline of nuclear engineering today) are examples of what he had in mind, but perhaps not exclusively. Atomic clock, potential applications of ultracold atom, etc., for instance, should reasonably belong to "Atomic engineering". Atomic engineering may need to be a superset of nuclear engineering, due to historical usage of terms like Atoms for Peace, International Atomic Energy Agency, atomic engineer, etc.

An inclusive definition could be "exploiting the atomic characters of matter for engineering applications". The atomic character could be the atomic spin (e.g. in Nuclear magnetic resonance and quantum computing applications), atomic position (e.g. Optical lattice), atomic mass (e.g. atomic power), etc.

Richard Feynman, in his famous 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" on the trend of miniaturization, envisioned

"But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately – in the great future – we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them

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When we get to the very, very small world – say circuits of seven atoms – we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc."


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Wikipedia

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