The most fundemental science?

A great deal of nanotechnology is surface chemistry.

Well nanotech makes use of mechanical engineering (which tends to physics) and materials science (which tends to chemistry).

Well nanotech makes use of mechanical engineering (which tends to physics) and materials science (which tends to chemistry).

Chemistry get's all it's info at the nano-scale from physicists, yes all of it, everything from electromagnetism to z, so nanotech technically speaking is either physics with chemistry or biophysics in the case of certain organic based reseach. Mostly though it's physics, which explains why NASA have a research site on it. In fact I read a really interesting overview about DNA at the nano scale the other day. Any scale where quantum mechanics laws begin to dominate is physics. Chemists generally deal with the molecular scale up. Physicists from the sub atomic up. And in some more whacky cases from the sub sub atomic up.

That's not what I said, what I said was all the laws at this scale came from physics.

I said most of it is physics.

You can call it what you like bio-engineering, material engineering, but most of it is a collaboration between x and physics.

And not materials that's of course because it's physics though, not because superconductors aren't materials and it certainly is material research, again though the scales in question require physics laws to accommodate them.

Look physics/chemistry, biophysicist, these aren't swear words you know. I'd of thought all the sciences collaberate on the nano-scale but no it's all chemists and engineers obviously.

And you can call NASA's "engineering" or bio-engineering that doesn't change the fact that it's a collaberation of physicists and bioligists. Why do you hate physics so much?

OK everything at the nano-scale is engineering and chemistry and biology and physicists have nothing to say about interactions at this scale, you happy now?

There are a serious shortage of physicists in many areas these days.

Well I wasn't trying to say that physics was the be all and end all and you obviously weren't trying to say it wasn't important, so let's just put it down to a misunderstanding

This is worse than the fridge debate Chemboy had previously...

Mathematics is fundamental to the actual usefulness of Physics and Chemistry. When Scientific concepts are actually useful in the real world there is a huge amount of collusion between the Sciences. There is no right answer to the question, 'What is the most fundamental Science?', however, without Mathematics the study of Science would be useless to us.

Q.E.D.?

Gotta love how British Library are scanning their stuff upside-down!

I'd like to agree with what's being said about maths not being a science. To me, the necessary and sufficient condition of something being a science is that is uses the scientific method. The scientific method is empirical in nature, while Maths is a rational field of study. Hence it's not a science. I'd be more inclined to classify maths as one of the humanities rather than one of the sciences.

What is noteworthy though is that a substantial part of mathematics has been developed with a scientific application in mind. It is no surprise that if you define $f$ to be a subset of $\mathbb R^2$ such that $(a, b), (c, d)\in f \wedge a = c \Rightarrow b = d$, let f(x) denote the real number y such that $(x, y) \in f$, define f'(x) to be a similar subset of $\mathbf R^2$ such that for all $\forall \epsilon > 0: \exists \delta > 0: \forall h, 0 < h < \delta, \left|f'(x) - \frac{1}{2}\left(f(x+h) - f(x - h)\right)\right| < \epsilon$ etc etc, you can get something, F = ma that with very good accuracy can describe the force acting on a particl position of a particle moving along a straight line. Because, that concept of the derivative was more or less created with the intention of describing the motion of a particle. My point being, that although maths seems to be describing the universe, the realm of the natural sciences, it does so only because we have chosen to develop it in that way; clearly, there are much more esoteric definitions of the derivative, that have no bearing at all the material world we live in. What I am trying to say is that mathematics is fundamentally not a means, a tool, of looking at the universe, (although that certainly is a very nice side-effect), and therefore is not a science, but a study of something much, much deeper, or perhaps something much, much more meaningless, depending on who you ask.