Using “meta-science” as a somewhat expansive term for history, philosophy, and sociology of science. And using my blog as a place to write about something besides the physical chemistry of carbon nanomaterials in various liquids.
- To what extent is sloppy/misleading terminology an attempt to cash in on buzzwords? Clearly, we know that motive exists – there aren’t two major papers trying to narrow down precise definitions of graphene-related terms for nothing. But as the papers also suggest, at what point is it a legitimate debate in the community about setting a definition? “Graphene” was a term that described a useful theoretical construct for decades before anyone ever thought* someone could make a real sheet of it, so maybe it isn’t unreasonable that people started using it to describe a variety of physical things related to the original idea.
- This contains a sort of follow-up: What properties do people use in clarifying these definitions and how much does it vary by background? Personally, I would say I’m way closer to the ideal of “graphene” than lots of people working with more extensively chemically modified graphene derivatives and am fine with using it for almost anything that’s nearly all sp2 carbon with about 10 layers or less. But would a physicist who cares more about the electronic properties, and which vary a lot based on the number of layers even in the lower limit, consider that maddening?
- Nanoscience is very interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary, but individual researchers can be quite grounded in just one field. How much work is being done where researchers are missing basic knowledge of another field their work is now straddling?
- For instance, when reading up on polymer nanocomposites, it seems noted by lots of people with extensive polymer science backgrounds that there are many papers that don’t refer to basic aspects of polymer physics. My hunch is that a lot of this comes from the fact that many people in this field started working on the nanoparticles they want to incorporate into the composites and then moved into the composites. They may have backgrounds more in fields like solid-state physics, electrical engineering, or (inorganic/metallic/ceramic) materials science, where they would have been less likely to deal with polymer theory.
- Similarly, it was noted in one paper I read that a lot of talk about solutions of nanoparticles probably would be more precise if the discussion was framed in terminology of colloids and dispersions.
Oh my gosh, I made fun of the subtitle for like two years, but it’s true
- Is the ontological status of defects in nanoscience distinct from their treatment in bulk studies of materials? This is a bit related to the first question in that some definitions would preclude the existence of some defects in the referent material/structure.
- On the other hand, does this stricter treatment make more sense in the few atom limit of many nanomaterials? Chemists can literally specify the type and location of every atom in successful products of well-studied cluster reactions, though these are even pushing the term “nano” (though in the sense they may be too small).
- Is this a reflection of applications of defects at the different scales? (More philosophically worded, are defects treated differently because of their teleological nature?) At the bulk level, we work to engineer the nature of defects to help develop the properties we want. At the nanoscale, some structures can basically be ruined for certain applications by the mislocation of a single atom. Is this also a reflection of the current practical process of needing to scale up the ability to make nanomaterials? E.g. as more realistic approaches to large-scale nanotech fabrication are developed, will the practical treatment of defects in nanomaterials converge to that of how we treat defects in the bulk?
*Okay, more like anyone cared a lot about it, since there are papers going back to the 1960s where researchers describe what appear to be atomic monolayers of graphite.
nontrivial problems 