Writing Atoms/Atomic Writing: Reading Nanotechnology’s ... · Draft: please do not cite or circulate without permission Hanson 2 and other tiny machines out of atoms. According

Writing Atoms/Atomic Writing:

Reading Nanotechnology’s Digital Rhetorics

Valerie L. Hanson

Assistant Professor of Writing Philadelphia University

School House Lane and Henry Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19144

(215) 951-2795 [email protected]

Draft: please do not cite or circulate without permission Hanson 1

Writing Atoms/Atomic Writing:

Reading Nanotechnology’s Digital Rhetorics

On April 5, 1990, a letter appeared in the scientific journal Nature that demonstrated a

new attribute of a recent scientific visualization technology, the scanning tunneling microscope

(STM): the ability to move individual atoms. In a few pages of text and images, D. M. Eigler and

E. K. Schweizer explained how they had manipulated 35 individual xenon atoms to spell the

letters “I,” “B” and “M” (Eigler and Schweizer 525). This publication created a stir within the

scientific community by its demonstration of what could be the first step towards building

structures from the atoms up. Insofar as atomic or molecular manipulation also is part of the

overall public definition of nanotechnology,1 this example of atomic control has helped spur

nanotechnology, to which both federal and private sources are contributing considerable funds.2

Eigler and Schweizer’s demonstration also adds to what is emerging as the main origin

narrative of nanotechnology’s development. This narrative begins with Richard Feynman’s

December 29, 1959 speech, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a

New Field of Physics,” given at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting. In this speech,

Feynman proposes a future field based on “manipulating and controlling things on a small

scale,” arguing that no theoretical reason contradicts the possibility of making storage devices

1 For example, see the Oxford English Dictionary definition of nanotechnology, or the National Nanotechnology Initiative web site. 2 These resources include, for example, the government funds comprising the multi-agency National Nanotechnology Initiative's budget, which in 2005 was $1.08 billion: the budget for 2006 is estimated at $1.3 billion, and the 2007 budget request is $1.27 billion. The agencies involved in this venture are the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce, Agriculture, Homeland Security and Justice. (National Nanotechnology Initiative).


and other tiny machines out of atoms. According to this narrative, Feynman’s predictions have

become reality through developments such as Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer’s mid-1980’s

invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1986,

and then Eigler and Schweizer’s demonstration of the STM’s manipulating abilities in 1990. This

origin narrative’s frequent appearance in histories and explanations of nanotechnology for non-

specialist audiences (including scientists who are not researching nanotechnology)3 suggest that

it forms a framework from which one can gain scientific literacy about this emerging field.

(More on this narrative later.)

However, Eigler and Schweizer’s demonstration, often accompanying the completed

“IBM” image,4 has also traveled in and of itself to non-scientific readers. It has circulated

beyond the pages of Nature to such venues as Good Morning America, CNN, NBC news, the AP

wire (Lovejoy) and Time (Stengel). It also continues to appear on Web sites, in definitions of

nanotechnology, such as that on How Stuff Works (Bonsor);5 in nanotechnology descriptions

and promotions (see Drexler, Peterson and Pergamit for example); and even in musings on

world-wide doom (see “Scrunch” for example). Accounts also appear in print publications,

including popular histories like Ed Regis’s Nano (11, 232) and sci-fi nanothrillers like Michael

3 Feynman’s speech as the origin of nanotechnology appears almost uniformly in popularizations of nanotechnology: the only other, although much less frequently cited, main contender is Albert Einstein’s doctoral dissertation in which Einstein calculates the size of a sugar molecule. For examples of Feynman’s influence, in addition to Drexler, see the special section of Science 254 (29 Nov 1991) devoted to nanotechnology, Regis, Peterson, and online histories of nanotechnology such as Bonsor, Phoenix, and the Wikipedia entry on nanotechnology. For a critical analysis of the influence of Feynman’s speech, see Toumey. Baird and Shew offer a critical account of the history of nanotechnology. 4 Although Eigler and Schweizer published a series of six images demonstrating the construction of the letters in their publication in Nature, I focus here on the last image, that of the completed letters, because it has traveled most frequently to other contexts without the other five images.


Crichton’s bestselling Prey (133). This additional audience for the “IBM” image raises questions

about what and how it communicates about nanotechnology, science, and the material world as it

travels.

In addition to serving as an advertisement for Eigler and Schweizer’s employer, their use

of writing to demonstrate atomic manipulation can be contextualized within the microelectronics

community’s informal practice of writing messages or drawing pictures to show the success of

new lithographic techniques for manufacturing chips (Mody). In this context, the “IBM” image

communicates Eigler and Schweizer’s success at manipulating the STM to create these letters.

For this audience, as well as for the non-scientific audience, writing “IBM” then functions as

proof that such manipulation has occurred, demonstrated by Eigler and Schweizer’s use of

uniquely human patterns, letters. However, for the audience unfamiliar with nanotechnology, it

also communicates scientists’ level of control of the natural world. In a sense, arranging and

visualizing atoms in patterns of letters shows not only how such manipulations can convert

matter into letters, but also how nature becomes writable, and, literally, writing— how the world

becomes text. However, while the letters “I,” “B,” and “M” may be clearly delineated, what this

image communicates more specifically about nanotechnology and the material world as it

travels, and what its readings suggest about scientific literacy, is less apparent.

Eigler and Schweizer’s image of text also raises questions about how digital images

function in scientific communication, especially given visualization technologies that let us see

the quite literally unseeable, such as these individual xenon atoms. How Eigler and Schweizer

communicate this demonstration and its implications becomes complicated in that the “IBM”

image calls attention to its roles as text and image as well as to its materiality and signification,

5 However, Bonsor mistakenly credits the atomic force microscope with creating the “IBM”


while also invoking and yet troubling rhetorical conventions. Following how the image was

created and how it can be read highlight some features of digital images that enrich and

complicate our understanding of the rhetorical functions of images.

Furthermore, and particularly given the “IBM” image’s participation in a larger trend of

presenting scientific information in digital, data-rich images, investigation of Eigler and

Schweizer’s atomic writing suggests how such images expand scientific communication, which

affects scientific literacy. As I argue below, the “IBM” image’s writing solicits a reading practice

that suggests the notion of scientific literacy should be expanded to one that not only entails

understanding science but also how science is done, including how scientific images are made.

Focusing attention on what this image shows and how it invites us to learn how to read it

differently provides rhetoricians with approaches to understanding how this and related images

communicate. In what follows, I investigate the “IBM” image’s writing as a trope in order to

pursue how Eigler and Schweizer’s demonstration in image form functions rhetorically to

illuminate what this demonstration can convey about digital images’ rhetorical dynamics as well

as how it might affect our understanding of what should comprise scientific literacy.

To do this, I examine the “IBM” image’s use of writing in light of the common scientific

trope of the book of nature. “The book of nature” configures the world as composed of signifiers

waiting to be understood by those humans who can read this natural language, and it emerged in

medieval sermons and middle-eastern texts (Eisenstein 456) as an analogy between the Bible and

the natural world as God’s writing. The book of nature in medieval times was construed as a

series of resemblances that were understandable if read allegorically. Then, in the seventeenth

century another book emerged in addition to the first one. This second book of nature, a favorite

image, not its forebear, the scanning tunneling microscope.


rhetorical figure among early modern scientists such as Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei,

presented measurable facts and laws of nature to those who could read them empirically. Galileo,

for example, in what is perhaps the most famous description of this figure, contended that the

“grand book the universe which stands continually open to our gaze . . . [is] written in the

language of mathematics . . . its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures”

(Galileo qtd in Eisenstein 458). The suggestion that humans can not only “read” the wonders of

the natural world but also can read them in mathematical language became a guiding and

justificatory theme in scientific discourse as it associates reasoning through mathematics with the

facts of the natural world. This trope circulates in both words and images through scientific

disciplines and aids in framing the relations between scientist and the natural objects she or he

studies.

At first glance, the “IBM” image may appear to fit neatly within this common scientific

figuration of writing. It suggests, for example, that atoms can be read as long as we have the

ability to see them. However, because this image also communicates a demonstration of the

human ability to manipulate atoms, and because Eigler and Schweizer communicate their

message in an image of text, this image’s figuration of writing deviates from the book of nature

trope of writing. Instead, as I argue below, this image frames writing as a process, not a product.

This focus on process significantly affects how and what this image communicates. Attention to

process is also an important part of understanding the rhetorical work of digital images in

scientific communication and in scientific literacy. However, before turning to the “IBM” image,

I describe this trope’s more conventional uses within Feynman’s speech and then explore how

the “IBM” images depart from Feynman’s use of writing—and in so doing, create an additional

meaning for this trope. In Feynman’s speech and the “IBM” image, the figurations of atoms and


the conception of information are entwined, for in both speech and image, atoms are part of what

expresses information and are linked with the trope of writing. As I explain below, the writing in

these images makes atom manipulation—and atoms as objects of scientific knowledge as well as

communicators—visible in ways that complicate the current narrative of nanotechnology’s

development specifically, and scientific literacy in general.

Making Matter Signify: From the Book of Nature to Writing Atoms

According to its usual development narrative, nanotechnology’s conception as a field

occurred in “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of

Physics,” Feynman’s 1959 speech given at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting. In

this speech, after Feynman proposes a future field for physics based on small-scale control and

manipulation of matter, he explains some ways such devices could be produced. He also calls for

better microscopes in order to see at the atomic level. Feynman ends the speech with an

announcement of two prizes to start making some of this “room at the bottom:” the first for

reproducing a book’s page “1/25,000 in linear scale in such manner that it can be read by an

electron microscope,” and the second for an electric motor that fits within a 1/64 inch cube. As

audience member Paul Schlicta recalls, most of the audience thought that Feynman “was trying

to be funny” by presenting a series of zany propositions (Appenzeller 1300); yet the speech

gained attention and was subsequently published in Engineering and Science’s February 1960

issue as well as, more recently, online (Feynman). The speech gained more attention as a

founding document of nanotechnology after K. Eric Drexler cited it in his popular promotion of

nanotechnology, Engines of Creation. Since then, Feynman’s speech has assumed a nearly

uncontested originary role in nanotechnology narratives.


Feynman’s uses of rhetorical tropes, including the trope of writing, help him articulate

within this speech the possibilities and boundaries of this “room at the bottom.” Feynman

mentions writing to clarify the scale he envisions when he explains that “there is a device on the

market . . . by which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing;

that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss.” He asks, why can’t

someone “write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?” and

then suggests writing the holdings of the Library of Congress, the British Museum Library and

the National Library of France on one pin’s head. While Feynman refers to micrographia, the

practice of tiny writing, his use of writing creates an additional conventional association. In his

expansion from the Lord’s Prayer to the encyclopedia and then to not one but three libraries,

Feynman’s use of writing more closely approaches that associated with the trope of the book of

nature. Feynman links writing with objects, such as atoms, that already reside in nature’s book.

By connecting natural objects with writing, this trope also emphasizes writing’s use as a noun, a

physical collection of information for people to read if they know how.

Feynman’s use of the writing trope, especially as it connects to the book of nature, is also

entwined with a specific concept of information. After invoking the idea of tiny text, Feynman

soon shifts from letters to what he calls letters’ “information content.” He envisions recording

“information content in a code of dots and dashes or something like that, to represent the various

letters” by using “the interior of the metal as well,” the atoms themselves. The writing trope here

allows him to shift from recording information—collecting the book of nature’s contents—to

writing information, rearranging the “natural” material to the human-made by moving atoms into

a pattern that records data. His version of writing, with its associations to the book of nature,

enables this shift to occur seamlessly, as Feynman moves from the representational—letters,


similar to Galileo’s geometric figures and mathematical symbols—to the material, the atoms.

Yet, this shift is only possible because of the definition of information that Feynman implies in

his phrase “information content:” by emphasizing the separability of content from other aspects

of information (such as form), Feynman’s information aligns with Claude Shannon’s enormously

influential definition of information as substance-free pattern (Shannon).6 Information as pattern

then emphasizes significatory qualities over more material ones, which lets Feynman envision

atoms as stabilized entities so that they can be “read” and “written.” This conception of atoms

allows them to make meaning for the reader while eliding consideration of atomic

rearrangements’ possible material effects (such as on neighboring atoms, or on the instruments

manipulating them). Even as Feynman conceptualizes atoms as elements of a material-free

pattern, he also describes a physical place, a storage place for “information content.” While such

storage has spatial dimensions, it is also physically alterable, a point that Feynman glosses over,

perhaps because of atoms’ sheer tininess.

The writing trope resurfaces later in Feynman’s speech when he explicitly connects

writing to the natural world. He says,

the biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired me to

think of something that should be possible. Biology is not simply writing

information; it is doing something about it. A biological system can be

exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they

manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all

kinds of marvelous things—all on a very small scale. Also, they store

information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small

6 See Hayles, Posthuman for more on Shannon’s influence on cybernetics; for Shannon’s


which does what we want—that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at

that level.

In this instance, the trope of writing allows Feynman to draw an analogy between the book of

nature’s writing and human writing, echoing Galileo’s reference above. Feynman expands from

writing to writing’s effects, “doing something about it,” and through the analogy with the book

of nature’s storage of writing, Feynman suggests that because it is not a biologist but biology that

has originally manipulated information, the scientists he foresees manipulating at this small scale

would use the same process that is already involved in the book of nature’s biological writing.

Here again, the concept of information that allows this is information as material-free pattern,

able to be stored like a tiny version of the Library of Congress, no matter whether it is written in

text, images, or nucleotides. This association of manipulation with nature also erases possibilities

for effects on the writer, as this writing assumes a stable, unchanging and distant writer having

written in the book of nature, manipulating without contact, without being touched in return.

Therefore, the use of writing in this speech draws from the book of nature figuration to

make matter signify while at the same time it downplays the very “mattering” of matter. Because

of this conception of writing, Feynman’s ideas of what the “room at the bottom” looks like and

how such room could be used rely on dematerialized information flow and storage. This trope

then helps to frame manipulation in terms of conventional scientific conceptions of humans’

relationships with nature as a book written in objects and mathematics. In this way, Feynman

anticipates atomic manipulation as a scientific practice in which scientists maneuver individual

atoms so that they can store material-free information without affecting the scientists who

perform the manipulation. Scientific literacy in this model would entail the ability to read what

influence on molecular biology, see Doyle.


has been written in this book of nature. Following this logic, emphasis on material-free

information also would allow the writing in Eigler and Schweizer’s images to appear as simply

revelation, not production; however, as I'll suggest below, other factors emerging during the

production of these images as well as the practices viewers engage in when they read these

images call for a closer look at this instantiation of writing.

From Information to Act: Writing “IBM”

Feynman’s speech and Eigler and Schweizer’s “IBM” image are linked not only by their

participation in the standard originary narrative in which Eigler and Schweizer use the recently-

invented STM to realize Feynman’s exhortation to explore the “room at the bottom” but also by

their use of writing as a structuring trope. At first glance, writing seems to function in the “IBM”

image as it does in Feynman’s speech. Indeed, one could read Eigler and Schweizer’s choice of

writing to demonstrate manipulability as a reference to the book of nature, following biology’s

lead in what Feynman characterized as “doing something about it.” (Literally, of course, this

image did appear in the journal of Nature, if not the book.) In addition, reading this image’s use

of writing in relation to the book of nature figuration emphasizes the textual, not the imaged,

form of this accomplishment. This reading then blurs the line between text and image, and

enables the image to be cited as text. Additionally, such a reading also smudges the differences

between image and text in written descriptions because such writing necessarily includes the

image’s main entity, the company acronym, as the letters physically form it on the page: IBM.

However, I suggest that a rhetorical analysis needs to consider that the “IBM” image does

not so simply convey this message, due to how it and other STM images are produced as well as

how digital images are viewed. Attending to the practices that researchers like Eigler and


Schweizer engage in when they create STM images, as well as the viewing practices in which

image viewers participate, can more fully explain these images’ effects and functions, as well as

how scientific literacy may be affected by images produced by highly mediated visualization

technologies like the STM. Scholars of scientific images from other fields have begun to pay

attention to practice as they consider scientific images, such as in the sociology and history of

science (see Lynch and Lynch and Edgerton for example). Additionally, Luc Pauwels has

recently argued for considering a scientific visualization’s production as a crucial component of

study (21) in his edited collection Visual Cultures of Science, and visual studies scholars like

James Elkins in his book Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction have argued that

understanding an image’s production technologies is integral to achieving visual literacy,

especially for non-art images such as those used in scientific discourse.

However, these scholars of scientific images have not focused on rhetoric specifically:

how might attention to an image’s medium and production practices also be useful for

rhetoricians? Building on attention within rhetoric to scientific practice, such as Heather Graves’

recent study of physicists’ rhetoric in their experimental practices, considering production

practices as well as viewing practices while analyzing images’ rhetorical functions may expand

knowledge of composing and communication practices, especially as they may occur across

media. In Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles suggests a method she terms media-specific

analysis, which encourages the analyzer to follow a rhetorical form across media to “explore

how medium-specific possibilities and constraints shape texts” (31). Expanding on Hayles’

suggestion to also include analysis of production practices, I suggest, can allow rhetoricians to

explore how images’ technology- and medium-specific possibilities and constraints can affect

the rhetorics of scientific discourse.


When the “IBM” image is read taking into account its production processes as well as

characteristics of its medium, the digital image, other factors emerge which dislodge the

emphasis on objects as fixed examples of nature’s writing and so weaken the link to the book of

nature figuration. Such factors include the viewer participation the image solicits and the deeply

interactive imaging processes that the STM technology and microscope user engage in to

produce the “IBM” image and others like it. These practices affect how and what STM images

communicate, and so when the “IBM” image is read taking these practices into account, the

writing appearing in them becomes linked with a highly participatory process, not a collection of

information such as the writing found in the book of nature.

The Work of Digital Images

That the writing in Eigler and Schweizer’s demonstration does not occur within a speech

or entirely within a written document (like Feynman’s use of the trope) but within an image

changes how viewers respond to this trope’s instantiation. As film theorist Steven Shaviro

explains in his book on film’s registers of affect The Cinematic Body, “we respond viscerally to

visual forms, before having the leisure to read or interpret them as symbols” (26), and so viewers

respond to images such as the “IBM” image differently than text. For example, because of a

shadowing effect under each atom in this image, viewers first get an impression of raised bumps

like an atomic Braille that they may feel on their fingertips as they run their eyes over the

image’s surface. Viewers then connect the dots together like a constellation from stars to read the

letters I, B, and M together. Only then do viewers, as readers, register the atomic writing as the

name of the company, a sort of atomic graffiti: “IBM was here.”


Because images do create such pre-significatory, affective responses, the image has

already communicated—and viewers have already started to respond—before viewers begin

processing the argument or meaning. Such responses constitute one major difference from how

we usually think of text’s communicative properties. Here, communication is similar to Derrida’s

explanation of the term in “Signature, Event, Context,” where he writes that the definition of

communication primary in such terms as “communicating doors” is communication as a force,

transmitted through contact between two things, not a means of representation or signification

(309). The “IBM” image, then, like other visual forms, through this force of communication

affects us even before we sense its meaning.

In showing spaces between the atoms, this image also extends what is usually the instant

separating seeing what text is made of and understanding it as text. When viewers of the “IBM”

image do begin to understand it as a signification, they engage in a more participatory reading

process because first they must themselves assemble letters from this collection of atoms through

the pattern the atoms form. When viewers see these atomic arrangements as letters, the image

becomes an interface and becomes transparent as it mimics a page or word processing program,

so that viewers see the letters as text. During this image-specific process of visceral response and

participation in forming the letters to be read, the viewer becomes involved in the process of

reading. This process also creates an impression of atoms as tangible entities, as the viewer must

move from atom to atom to assemble the letters.

The presentation of Eigler and Schweizer’s accomplishment in image form and the

subsequent effects on viewers’ reading processes emphasize the interactions necessary to read

this image, and so counter the idea of reading inherent in the book of nature figuration. Readers

of the “IBM” image do not merely try to understand the natural marks’ (here, atoms’)


signification; instead, readers also construct the writing as they read it. This participatory process

changes writing’s connotations in the “IBM” image, and, in so doing, allows the image to create

a different relationship between the reader and the writing than between the reader and the

writing in Feynman’s speech.

STM Imaging Processes

Similar to “IBM” image viewers’ participatory reading practices, STM users also engage

in highly interactive processes to produce images, from both operating the microscope apparatus

to then creating an image from the data collected. The microscope’s highly mediated image

production processes contribute to this participation, because the STM does not image optically:

optical photography of atoms at this resolution literally cannot happen because the resolution

needed to image an atom (measuring anywhere from one to five Ångstroms) is smaller than any

optical microscope’s minimum possible resolution, half the wavelength of light (0.2

micrometers, or 2,000 Ångstroms). Instead, the microscope tip registers changes in the voltages

it measures as it sweeps across the sample just above the surface and encounters the surface

atoms’ electrons.7 The collected data is then displayed in a matrix form on a monitor. Variations

in data points’ values register as either brightness or color, creating an image the user can then

respond to. Because the user “sees” through the computer’s screen and interacts with the sample

through the onscreen digital image, the image becomes not only a display but an interface with

the sample.

In the case of atom manipulation, this interaction is amplified. As Eigler recounts in his

essay “From the Bottom Up: Building Things with Atoms,” in September 1989, Eigler and


Schweizer noticed a few streaks in an image the STM produced during an experiment with

xenon, and while investigating the cause, they realized that they could create the streaks while

maneuvering the microscope’s tip (431). They experimented with moving a xenon atom whose

progress they followed on the STM’s screen by flipping back and forth between imaging and

movement modes. After some practice with manipulating the xenon atom on the nickel surface

through interacting with the STM’s imaging and tip-positioning capacities, they generated

another image of xenon atoms, this time lined up in a row, and then produced the “IBM” image.8

In these images’ production process, Eigler and Schweizer learned how to respond to the atoms

and microscope in particular ways through interactions with the images, which they then turned

into writing. For the writers, writing is similar to the process of interacting with atoms, as a

pattern emerges from their hands’ movements, shifting into letters into meaning. Writing

becomes a strategy for learning how to interact with atoms.

The participatory nature of this imaging process is reinforced through the STM image’s

continued processing after the data is collected and displayed as a matrix: researchers interact

with the data points through the computer’s transformation of the data into pixels’ brightness and

color on the STM’s computer screen. Also, they may use lab-generated or commercial computer

programs like MATLAB or Photoshop to emphasize certain patterns in the collected data during

analysis or for publication. For example, the researchers may screen out nonrelevant data, such

as the background nickel atoms’ features, to clarify the details they want to display, or they may

add false color such as the blue and gray in the IBM-Almaden Visualization Lab’s online version

7 Readers interested in further details about the microscope’s operation can find a particularly accessible account of the microscope apparatus by its inventors in Binnig and Rohrer. 8 Although Eigler and Schweizer published the xenon atom line as well as the “IBM” images in the same Nature article, the image of the atomic line was published on the last page (526) and


of the “IBM” image (IBM Almaden) to emphasize variations and differences between data

points. Therefore, the writing used in the “IBM” image’s creation links to acts that not only

create new text out of random atoms but also create an image of text. This text creation from

both atoms and pixels in this digital image emphasizes the process of manipulating, the atomic

writing that demonstrates Eigler and Schweizer’s breakthrough.

For those who experience using the scanning tunneling microscope, or who understand

the “IBM” image’s creation process when they see it, emphasis on the intertwined acts of writing

and atom manipulation creates a different association for the writing trope than the trope of

writing found in the book of nature. Instead of a trope that frames writing as already fully

formed, writing in the “IBM” image is figured as a repeatable, participatory act, where writing

names the act that incorporates atoms as well as readers who are also writers, writers who are

also readers. Indeed, this association with actions implies that what is to be read does not exist

before this interactive process, but as the “IBM” image viewer constructs the letters from atoms:

what is to be read emerges from the interaction. In contrast to the writing in the book of nature

trope, writing in the “IBM” image connotes more of an experiment than a collection or product,

and encourages scientists to engage in the familiar process of writing in order to learn how to

manipulate atoms with the scanning tunneling microscope.

Informatic Atoms, Haptic Informatics

While attending to only the textual qualities of the “IBM” image does generate some

sense of how it communicates, the deeply participatory processes that both viewers and

microscope users engage in create a different connotation of writing in this image than in the

not often subsequently cited. See Stroscio and Eigler, Fig 6(a), 1324, for one example of the


book of nature figuration. For STM users and viewers of the “IBM” image, writing becomes a

haptic strategy linked to atom manipulation: a repeatable, deeply participatory and synesthetic

act that bodily incorporates image viewers and microscope users within the writing process. This

writing configures information and the object of knowledge, here the atom, in slightly different

registers, which in turn affect their understanding and the field’s formation.

This departure of the “IBM” image’s use of writing from that associated with the book of

nature such as that used in Feynman’s speech affects the concept of information associated with

the writing: here, information becomes mutable, both for image viewers as readers and writers,

and for STM users who also both read and write the atomic letters. For image viewers, the

images affect them throughout their viewing before they make meaning of the dots scattered

across the screen, while they form letters out of the dots, and then as they read the letters. As

STM users engage in the process of interacting with the microscope sample, the displayed

information materially affects STM users as they respond to the image of writing, the pixels’

arrangement on the screen. Their responses alter the information that they register on the

microscope’s computer screen.

What becomes information is also more tangible than Shannon’s material-free patterns

for both image viewers and STM users, as the viewers move from atom to atom to create the

information, and as STM users manipulate atoms, experiencing the effects of such movements

by seeing changes in the images. Information here is embodied and inseparable from the

responses of viewers and users as well as from its form, a concept for which Hayles argues

(Posthuman). In the case of the “IBM” images, information emerges from the interactions

between atoms, microscope apparatus, and image form, as well as viewers and users, in a process

atomic line’s rare citation as the first instance of manipulation.


that suggests Susan Oyama’s description of information that does not exist a priori but instead

co-develops with the form in which it is communicated (2). As form and information co-develop

and interact with each other in the process of formation, both the information and its presentation

transform due to these production processes.

The different writing trope presented in the “IBM” image also calls attention to atoms’

existence as tangible objects. While Feynman’s speech elides atoms’ materiality, the IBM image

atoms’ manipulability depends on their materiality. This participatory—and anticipatory—nature

of atom manipulation expressed in these images emphasizes the claim of atoms’ existence and

materiality as tangible, isolable, and manipulable objects. This claim is especially communicated

in the images’ visual articulation of atoms as bounded spheres, like marbles, for example. Such

an articulation obscures various attributes of atoms which may affect how they can be touched,

isolated, or manipulated. For example, what these images do not make visible is that, according

to quantum mechanics, atoms do not have such demarcated boundaries, but exchange electrons

with neighboring atoms. What also is hidden is that this experiment was carried out at four

degrees Kelvin to keep these atoms in place long enough for Eigler and Schweizer to manipulate

them. However, a focus on the act of writing as opposed to a product includes an expectation of

response from the atoms, inviting viewers to envision or question how this move occurred.

This version of atoms can affect how one views other possible structures and propositions

for what will become nanotechnology. For example, some nanotechnology proponents envision

building atomic or molecular machines from the atoms up: one particularly vivid example is the

series of molecular gears that K. Eric Drexler posited and simulated on a computer (Drexler), in

which atoms resemble different colors of marbles neatly stacked on top of each other. Eliding the

participatory dynamics of atom manipulation that the “IBM” image communicates through


writing obscures the controversy around whether in fact Drexler’s gears are physically possible,

debates that have occurred since Engines of Creation was published (see Regis), and in which

Nobel laureate Richard Smalley for one has participated (Smalley).9 However, following the

viewing and imaging practices which result in these images—and that the altered trope of writing

here communicates—underlines the deeply interactive, participatory processes of

nanotechnological “writing” that incorporate viewers and microscope users as well as atoms.

Conclusion: Reading Nanotechnology and the Rhetorical Work of Digital Images

In his discussion of the book of nature trope’s competing connotations in the seventeenth

century, Ken Robinson explains that what changed from one perspective on this trope to the

other is that “the book which they see is quite different. It is determined by their reading tools”

(89). One way to understand the alteration of the trope that the “IBM” image expresses is to see a

shift in reading practices occurring, as the tools—the ability to move atoms as well as the digital

images which allow us to see atoms—create different relations between atoms, viewers,

microscope users, and the microscope apparatus. These relations create a different reading

practice which may then lead to alternative rhetorical strategies or emphases, such as, I suggest

in this example, a changed trope. While Feynman might have anticipated manipulating atoms

within the familiar rhetorical frame of reading the book of nature ascribed to scientists such as

Galileo, Eigler and Schweizer in their practices ended up departing from this figuration and

created different reading and writing practices, affected by their interactions with atoms. What

9 Simson Garfinkel also discusses whether such ideas are possible in an early critical review of nanotechnology. He quotes for example MIT chemistry professor Robert J. Silby: “‘[Drexler] discusses these molecular systems as mechanical systems [. . . .] He bangs them and they go.’ The problem is, Dr. Silby explains, ‘molecules are not rigid—they vibrate, they have bending motions’” (105).


becomes visible through this practice is something that Feynman’s frame did not show, a relation

with atoms and matter that causes both STM users and viewers to not read a book; instead,

through their deeply participatory processes of atom manipulation and image production, they

co-create the writing they then can read through the medium of the digital image.

The fact that the “IBM” writing trope does not correspond to the conventional “book of

nature” trope that can be seen in Feynman’s speech suggests a corresponding shift in

conceptualizing nanotechnology, one that occurs at a point where Eigler and Schweizer do not

speculate about nanotechnology, as Feynman’s speech did, but experience nanotechnological

phenomena. Through the process of learning how to manipulate atoms and through the

technologies of the microscope and the computer software abilities which allowed them to create

digital images of their experience, Eigler and Schweizer generated images of their interactions

with the unseeable. These interactions re-figure information and atoms as material, tangible

entities that do not function entirely as Feynman envisioned.

Reading this image, then, also aids in complicating the standard nanotechnology

narrative, for it points out a discontinuity in its cause-effect plotline. However, it also suggests

that perhaps a very different story is being written, one that is forming beyond conventional

tropes such as writing in the book of nature. This alternative narrative is one that may influence

the trajectory of nanotechnology as well as our understanding of atoms and our world: analyzing

how and what significant discursive events such as the “IBM” image communicate about

nanotechnology may help us identify the alternative narrative or narratives that do explain the

history and possible directions of this emerging field.

Attending to tropes’ expression in digital images such as the “IBM” image also suggests

that the technologies used to create scientific images can affect how they communicate as well as


what is possible for them to show. In the case of the “IBM” image, both the STM and the

properties of the digital image allow researchers to provide a demonstration of their experiment

as well as evidence of that experiment. The dynamics of the digital image and the STM that

make this possible in the case of the “IBM” image rely on the ability of the researchers and the

image viewers to interact with the image and the xenon atoms. These interactive dynamics affect

the form as well as information that the researchers express. They also allow STM users to create

images that communicate through interactions that help determine the meaning as well as the

effect that these images have. In this way, focusing on the technologies used to produce as well

as convey an argument can alert rhetoricians to possible persuasive effects of such

communications.

In the case of the “IBM” image, for example, one highly persuasive feature that is

expressed in the trope of writing and also appears in its production and viewing practices is the

haptic interactivity required of image viewers and image creators. Interactivity in this case

solicits STM image viewers and creators to spend more time in meaning-making as they are

called on to respond physically to the image by either adjusting the STM or moving their eyes

from one spot to another in order to make meaning. Here, the trope of writing in the “IBM”

image communicates first according Derrida’s notion of communication as a force as well as,

later, communication as signification. Therefore, the participation required to make and read this

image functions in both affective and significatory rhetorical registers.

The interactivity expressed through the “IBM” image’s trope of writing invites viewers

unfamiliar with the STM’s image-making process to learn how to respond to an STM image by

asking them to perform a task they are familiar with, writing, and so encourages them to learn

about this interactive capacity while they follow the demonstration that the STM image conveys.


Additionally, engaging viewers in the process of making meaning by following the researchers’

experiment encourages viewers to become more convinced of the validity of the experiment, and

so be persuaded that this image forms proof of the experiment’s success. While this essay’s focus

on one image is necessarily limited, the emphasis on interactivity suggested by the use of the

trope and the digital image suggests an interesting avenue to further explore the rhetorics –

affective and otherwise— that emerge in the use of digital images in scientific arguments as well

as in communication of science to non-scientific audiences.

The “IBM” image’s focus on the trope of writing as a process or act also creates some

interesting directions for scientific literacy. Reading the “IBM” image with attention to practices

not only provides understanding of Eigler and Schweizer’s experiment but also helps show how

science, in this case nanotechnology, is made. Readers participate in linking the atoms together,

and so in a sense follow along with Eigler and Schweizer as they learn how to manipulate atoms

as they write. Therefore, the scientific literacy the “IBM” image requires in order to read it

involves not only learning how to read the story of nanotechnology through understanding

scientific practices and the different rhetorics of the digital image, but also, as reading the “IBM”

images teaches us, learning how we are also writing the story as we read.


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