Ih8aloss, great post.
I agree with most of it, in that there is a upward curve
to nanotechnology that will revolutionize our lives and
that of our kids over the next 20-50 years.
But you forget Moore's Law, which is specific to microchips,
but has seen similar patterns in the industries that are
affected by microchips. I think Nanotechnology is one of
those. The reason is that we will have mass production of QD this
year, at one-tenth the price of previous product, and in any
quantity. That translates to instant adaptation of the
products it enables. Cost comes way down. Cost is the last
advance I left out of my previous post on QD mass production
enabling QMC to become the market leader, and stay there.
If it was not for the economy, with all the unemployment, I would be even more enthusiastic. While mass adaption is therefore still a few years away, the speed of change in technology is so much faster than 20 years. I say 5 years tops for what was 20 years wait in the last century. I read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Paradigms in college, and it says that all great disruptive science was not accepted by the scientists of that age but took the next generation to become the adopters of it.
I can cite so many examples where that is no longer the case. Look how the time gets shorter between the walkman to the MP3 player to the ipod to the itouch to the iphone, from the desktop to the laptop to the netbook. Well, maybe some of that took longer than I think. I have not read the book you cite about how technology gets accepted, so this is all just opinion.
The downloads in your post are good examples of the overall
market, as my last post #688 download is specific to the state of the market in QD development. The one called National Solar Technology Roadmap Multiple Exciton Generation. I was really excited about it because the things it lists are all things I know we are working on, or have accomplished. One of the items is "choose materials", will, duh, check that off! Most other solar companies are still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Either the material is scarce, or it needs multiple junctions, or runs, or special processing, or super-precise application in a vacuum, or dyes and coatings, - all the materials and processes they are using seem so complicated.
One theme common to all the industry analysis I read, is that no one knows from whom the "disruptive technology" in the nano field is going to come. Research is being done by the ton, or by the billions, but no one has come up with disruptive mass produced commercial product yet. Something that would be universally accepted, that would convince the cynics that this is it. Something that gives you that "Aha" moment. That is the type of eureka moment I felt when I started reading about Hague and Solterra and how it was different from existing companies. Its under the radar now, but will soon be on everyone's radar.