A frequent theme of mine is that our world is both too big and too small: Mass communication, information technology, and logistics have elevated the sense of a single global market — and we're lost in it. But, those same factors, plus the value we place on individual rights and personal liberty, with a heavy push from product marketing, all exaggerate the importance of one person's tastes, concerns, and opinions.

To be clearer: it takes time for one person to size up the world and determine what he or she believes, but there is so little time to do it because the world keeps delivering so many confusing details to sort through.

One day's batch of e-mail proved this again — and has me wondering what's in the atmosphere, or cybersphere. What sort of list have I landed on? If anyone can help me understand what any of the following has to do with casting metal, I'm listening:

First, I've been invited to attend the Nano Manufacturers Forum later this month. It's billed as a symposium to "encourage collaboration between nanotechnology experts and traditional manufacturers to develop more efficient ways to produce products through applications of the small science."

Exactly what sort of collaboration might that be, I'd like to know? The invitation came through the state cast metals association, of all things. Isn't this an industry of large-scale operations … and one that worries about shrinking marketshares and diminishing influence? I won't be attending, but I'm curious enough to say I want to believe. I've been promised some follow-up information, so stay tuned on this.

There's more. Alfred University has invited me to its annual John F. McMahon Lecture on October 25, to hear Dr. Robert L. Snyder, of Georgia Tech's School of Materials and Engineering, speak about “The New World of MSE: Nano and Bio Technology.” According to Snyder:

“The two most important events in Materials Science and Engineering in the past 50 years have been the introduction of surface-free energy as a tool for creating new materials and the cracking of the genetic code of the entire biosphere which is under way and is creating a tidal wave of information that is going to transform our technology to the core.  These two events are intertwined at the most fundamental level in that the key to the assembly of complex nanomachines lies within each of our cells. The ribosome has done its evolutionary job of getting us to 2006 and its now time to turn this marvelous machine loose to manufacture materials and machines that have nothing to do with evolution.”

 
Wow. Snyder promises to "look at methods to take genes from species producing desirable structures, perhaps modify them, and then retrofit them onto a compliant, single-celled bug who will then become a manufacturing unit." He continues:

"By mid 21st century, I believe that we will know enough genetics, biochemistry and materials science to computer design genes to produce devices from nanomachines to complete computer systems using the cellular machinery produced by evolution.”

Now, I'm getting put off by all this. It isn't just that I'm wondering what such people are talking about. I'm wondering why they're talking to me about it.

I suppose I should see the opportunities before they're gone for good. Just last week, I might have been at a conference of COMSOL Multiphysics users, for "three dozen mini courses and tutorial sessions on such topics as AC/DC systems, acoustics, bioengineering, chemical engineering, earth science, and porous media flow, electrostatics and electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, fluid structure interactions, heat transfer, materials science, MEMS, microfluidics, microwaves and RF, optics, parallel processing in COMSOL Multiphysics, thermo-mechanics, structural mechanics, and scientific and engineering education."

COMSOL Multiphysics is a modeling and simulation software environment for "any physics-based system," said to be especially effective at accounting for "multiphysics phenomena." So let me ask again, is there some metalcasting in all of that?

I'm open to learning, and I have no doubt that there's a lot to learn here. But, all this big world, little world, New World mumbo-jumbo has me desperate to get back to some real-world concerns.