Nobody agrees, so I chair the committee deciding.
The field grew faster than its vocabulary. “Machine”, “motor”, “switch” and “pump” are used to mean incompatible things by people who then talk past each other in the literature.
I argued the case in Nature Nanotechnology, and now chair the IUPAC task group writing the definitions, which turns out to be less a chemistry problem than a philosophy-of-language one.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.
Carson J. Bruns