This is just a sampling of the kinds of literary shenanigans that scientists produce one way or another.

Poetry

There is a 'nano' poem, in fact, it's a 17 syllable, 3 line haiku as follows

My poem is small

Even nanoscopical --

Can't be read at all.

We have a team of scientists from Cardiff University to thank for this effort which was written by team member, Kim Pham, then engraved. Each letter of the poem is 170 nm x 170 nm (170 billionths of a metre x 170 billionths of a metre) with the whole poem being 4.25 square microns (4.25 millionths of a metre square). The team used a focused ion beam for the engraving.

It is good to see that engineers and scientists appreciate poetry and can even write possibly record-breaking poems, but there are many other uses for this technique. We hope to be talking to interested parties involved in electronics, the automotive industry, environmental sensors, laboratory instruments, and medical equipment, [according to Professor Duc Truong Pham].^[1]

Influence

K. Eric Drexler's book, 'Engines of Creation', is not usually considered a literary work but it has had a big impact on writers (e.g. Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and others) and, by extension, popular culture. An engineer, Drexler was the first to popularize nanotechnology but it was his introduction of the 'grey goo' scenario (later to be joined by its cousin the 'green goo' scenario) that seems to have firmly established his ideas about nanotechnology in the public consciousness.

Briefly, Drexler suggested that atoms and molecules could be persuaded to self-assemble into useful materials. He called these self-assembling devices, nanoassemblers. In a chapter titled  'Engines of Destruction', echoing his book title, Drexler hypothesizes that the nanoassemblers could run out of control, grabbing atoms and molecules ruthlessly replicating themselves at the expense of everything else on the planet and reducing everything to 'grey goo'. Drexler has been bitterly criticized by his peers for the nanoassembler concept and the 'grey goo' scenario. He has admitted that he has since revised some of his ideas.^[2][3]

Anytime a nanotechnology story features a nanobot or some other nano device that runs amok and starts consuming everything in its environment, you have a variant of the 'grey goo' scenario. 'Green goo' scenarios are identical but the source is biological (for example, someone engineers a microscopic form of life that reproduces itself at the expense of all the other life forms around it. (For stories that feature 'goo' scenarios and nanotechnology risks in popular culture, under Jump joints, click on Storytellers create nano.)

Teeny tiny books

A Canadian laboratory at Simon Fraser University created the world's smallest book, as of April 2007. Like the nanoscopical poem, the book titled 'Teeny Ted from Turnip Town' can only be seen through a microscope. In this case, the scientists taught the sculptor how to use a gallium ion beam to carve the story into 30 microtablets, with each tablet measuring 10 x 15 microns (10 x 15 millionths of a metre).^[4] Karen Kavanaugh, an electronic materials scientist, who heads the laboratory where the work was done notes,

So you're not moving individual atoms around [as they do with scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes], you're using a sand blaster. But a focused sandblaster down to 7 nanometres [7 billionths of a metre] So the gallium ions are accelerated to high energies, 30 kilovolts, and then that amount of energy is transferred to the sample basically removing other atoms from its path. ... It's like carving on a stone wall.^[5]

Jump back

Scientists play too

Jump joints

Risks

Storytellers create nano

Jump points

Scientists eat junk food

Scientists get fashionable

Scientists get musical

Scientists get virtual 

Scientists get whimsical

Scientists read comics, watch tv, and more