I realized the other day that since moving to ScienceBlogs, I’m turning into John<\/A> Scalzi<\/A> (Does my new body have a brand name?), what with all the posting of cute images (and spending an inordinate amount of time taking pictures with an eye toward posting them), and assigning other bloggers homework. If I had a novel, I’d put it on the web, and make millions! Or something.<\/p>\n Anyway, it’s nice to have at least one of those things turned around on me: RPM at evolgen is asking for the “string theory” of other sciences<\/A>: the most controversial and possibly overhyped fields of study.<\/p>\n RPM has obviously pre-empted the most obvious physics answer, but if I’m allowed an interdisciplinary nomination, it would probably be something with “nano” in the name. The idea of nanotechnology has a great deal of promise, but a lot of what’s talked up as “nanotechnology” appears to be more of a buzzword grab than anything arising naturally from the science.<\/p>\n (Also, I’m always annoyed to hear things hyped as “nano-scale” only to find the dimensions given in microns (1000 nm). I mean, sure, that’s small, but if you’re going to allow micron-sized objects to be called “nano-scale,” then my watch is nanotechnology– after all, the face is only 25,400,000 nanometers across, give or take a bit, and the parts inside are smaller still…)<\/p>\n (I’ll also tip my nonexistent hat to Charles Clark of NIST, who dubbed Bose-Einstein-Condensates “nano-super-fluids” a while back, and predicted that there would be proposals for “using nano-super-fluids for quantum computing with biological molecules” within a few years…)<\/p>\n So, other than string theory, what’s your nomination for the “string theory” of physics?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I realized the other day that since moving to ScienceBlogs, I’m turning into John Scalzi (Does my new body have a brand name?), what with all the posting of cute images (and spending an inordinate amount of time taking pictures with an eye toward posting them), and assigning other bloggers homework. If I had a… Continue reading The String Theory of Other Sciences<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}