They toil against equilibrium, entropy, death. And since the Industrial Revolution, machines have become ubiquitous, a practically invisible backdrop to the macroscopic world. This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry goes to scientists who did foundational work in making machines part of the nano-scale world—that is, actually invisible.
A tiny lift, artificial muscles and miniscule motors. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 is awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for their design and production of molecular machines. They have developed molecules with controllable movements, which can perform a task when energy is added.