ABSTRACT
Ethnographic fieldwork can sometimes be tedious work. Day after day you collect massive amounts of data, data for which you do not see any imminent use. My first fieldwork among nanoscientists was in 2003–2004 at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers University of Technology, located in Gothenburg, Sweden. The scientists I followed experimented on the nanometer level, the level of single atoms and molecules. Nanoscience is also often referred to as the “next big thing” in research; compared to other disciplines, it is well funded, and there are high expectations about possible outcomes (Berube, 2006; Lok, 2010). The high level of interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology is partly explained by the significant expected economic outcomes but also by the more metaphysical notion of experimenting with nature’s “next to nothing,” atoms and molecules. Atoms and molecules are the last stable building blocks in our physical world and hence represent a “final frontier” for technoscientific advances.
