by kingmudsy

Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype...Indeed, Henry Petroski, a professor at Duke and the author of “To Engineer Is Human,” says that hype is necessary to attract development dollars. But he offers an important proviso: “If there is too much hype at the discovery stage and the product doesn’t live up to the hype, that’s one way of its becoming disappointing and abandoned, eventually.”

Guha, at I.B.M., believes that the field of nanotechnology has been oversold. “Nobody stands to benefit from giving the bad news,” he told me. “The scientist wants to give the good news, the journalist wants to give the good news—there is no feedback control to the system. In order to develop a technology, there is a lot of discipline that needs to go in, a lot of things that need to be done that are perhaps not as sexy.”...Guha lamented the “excessive hype” that has surrounded graphene as a replacement for silicon, and talked mournfully about how the effort to introduce a band gap is, at best, “one major innovation away.”

The article is pretty long-winded, but it talks a lot about the potential applications that are being developed, before explaining how the hype surrounding it may be detrimental, and how the properties of graphene make it incredibly difficult to 1) manufacture, and 2) actually apply it. Graphene, the hype surrounding it, and the hopes of the scientific community are compared to IBM's research of carbon nanotubes, and how they (IBM) have basically gone nowhere with that technology.

I found it interesting, but it may be old hat to some of you.