Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Gin Atomic inspired by the discovery of nanotechnology, celebrated by physicists on this day, because the concepts behind it were first outlined on December 29, 1959.
That’s when legendary physicist Richard Feynman first gave a lecture titled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics”at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech. There, Feynman explained to a rapt audience the concepts of nanotechnology and how even the entire Encyclopedia Britannica really could be written on the head of a pin.
Nanotechnology involves the understanding and control of matter at the nanometer-scale. The so-called nanoscale deals with dimensions between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers- and a nanometer is an extremely small unit of length—a billionth (10-9) of a meter.
Nanotechnology is not microscopy. “Nanotechnology is not simply working at ever smaller dimensions,” the U.S.-based National Nanotechnology Initiative says. “Rather, working at the nanoscale enables scientists to utilize the unique physical, chemical, mechanical, and optical properties of materials that naturally occur at that scale.” Scientists have made films by positioning individual atoms and physicists have won a Nobel Prize for their work on sheets of carbon so thin they’re basically two-dimensional.
On the nanometer-scale, materials may exhibit unusual properties. When you change the size of a particle, it can change color, for example. That’s because in nanometer-scale particles, the arrangement of atoms reflects light differently. Gold can appear dark red or purple, while silver can appear yellowish or amber-colored.
Nanotechnology can even increase the surface area of a material. This allows more atoms to interact with other materials. An increased surface area is one of the chief reasons nanometer-scale materials can be stronger, more durable, and more conductive than their larger-scale (called bulk) counterparts.
Of course, nanotechnology makes many people think about shrinking things, but we can assure you - today’s Drink Of The Day, the Gin Atomic, is anything but small.
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
