Futurity -- VANDERBILT (US) — Suppressing natural variability to increase reliability works well in some cases, but not so much on the nanoscale. That’s because objects at the nanoscale behave in a fundamentally different way than large-scale objects, says Peter Cummings, professor of chemical engineering at Vanderbilt University. The defining difference between the behaviors of large-scale and nanoscale objects is the role that noise—random disturbance—plays. At the level of atoms and molecules, that random motion can dominate to such an extent that making reliable devices becomes extremely difficult.
