As Roco spent hours contemplating tiny specks of toner, he had a revelation. Something really bizarre was happening once he zoomed in to the nanoscale, a realm where distances are measured in atomic lengths. The bits of toner transformed themselves from solid to liquid depending on their dimensions, shapes, or the distances between them and their neighbors. He saw for himself that the building blocks of nature -- whether liquid, solid, plasma or gas -- could theoretically be manipulated into, well, anything. All things converged on the nanoscale.

Two decades later, Roco's larger mission in U.S. nanotech policy is to bring about the conditions for differing schools of technology to converge. Physics, chemistry, biology? Don't mind the gap. It doesn't exist.

Or, according to one nanotech observer:

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