Atoms and Avatars: Virtual Worlds as Massively-Multiplayer Laboratories

Abstract

Nanotechnology thrives in the realm of the virtual. Throughout its history, the field has been shaped by futuristic visions of technological revolution, hyperbolic promises of scientific convergence at the molecular scale, and science fiction stories of the world rebuilt atom by atom (Milburn 2008). Even today, amid the welter of innovative nanomaterials that increasingly appear in everyday consumer products—the nanoparticles enhancing our sunscreens, the carbon nanotubes strengthening our tennis rackets, the antimicrobial nano‐silver lining our socks, the nanofilms protecting our wrinkle‐free trousers—the public rhetoric of nanotechnology constantly reminds us that such precision‐ engineered materials merely represent a trace or a premonition of the amazing future still to come. Mihail Roco, the senior advisor for nanotechnology at the U.S. National Science Foundation and a key architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), reassures us that “[t]oday nanotechnology is still in a formative phase,” characterized primarily by passive nanostructures added to existing products, but soon the world will be transformed by the “astonishing potential” immanent to nanoscale research (Roco 2006, 3). Indeed, this potential would seem to have already become visible and tactile, available to all of our senses, even in advance of the future