Books for the curious
Readable books on nanotechnology and its neighbors, chosen for people who aren't scientists. Each description says what the book is about, with the publisher's or a bookseller's own words linked. We don't rate books.
Where to start
Plain introductions to the very small.
Nanotechnology: A Very Short Introduction
Philip Moriarty · 2022 · Oxford University Press
A short guide from Oxford's Very Short Introductions series that starts from the question of what nanotechnology is and how it will affect us, and sorts the real science from the talk of nanobots and nanoswarms.
Stuff Matters
Mark Miodownik · 2014 · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
A materials scientist takes ten everyday materials, one a chapter, and explains the science behind them and the part they played in history. It won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Chips
The race to make transistors smaller.
Chip War
Chris Miller · 2022 · Scribner
The history of the fight to control microchips, the scarce resource the modern world runs on, from the first transistors to today's nanometer-scale factories.
Focus: The ASML Way
Marc Hijink · 2024 · Independently published
How ASML, a Dutch company most people have never heard of, came to build the extreme ultraviolet machines that print the world's most advanced chips.
Materials
Graphene, nanotubes and the stuff things are made of.
Graphene
Les Johnson and Joseph E. Meany · 2018 · Prometheus Books
A popular account of graphene, the sheet of carbon one atom thick made from the same element as pencil lead, and what it might be used for.
The big ideas
Where nanotechnology could go, and the arguments about it.
Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life
Richard A. L. Jones · 2007 · Oxford University Press
A physicist asks whether the dream of tiny machines that rebuild matter is realistic, and argues that the best guide to working at the nanoscale is the way living cells already do it.
Radical Abundance
K. Eric Drexler · 2013 · PublicAffairs
The engineer who popularized the idea of molecular manufacturing sets out his case that building things atom by atom could transform how the world makes everything. It is a forecast, not a record of what exists.
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