Engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. This study reveals how the increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions.

This article retraces the trajectory of a start-up company NanoInk Inc. and its primary technology, the Dip-Pen, which it researches, manufactures, and commercializes. The case is of interest because it introduces a series of under elucidated questions concerning the relationships between “instrument” and “tool,” the birth of a new category of company, the “knowledge enterprise,” the dynamics of relations between complexity and simplicity related to tools “simplexity,” and the idea of “nanofication,” which refers to the spread of familiarity of a (...) nano-permeated future throughout society. (shrink)