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Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy
Anonymous Kamath writes "IEEE Spectrum recently published an interview with aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy who's just written his first non-fiction book "Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable
Atoms" proposing the application of quantum dot technology on a large scale
thereby allowing one to control properties of materials at will. Another science fiction author laid down the principles of geostationary satellite communication
half a century ago."
I'm not an IEEE member...does that mean I can't read the interview?
Crap!
Yeah, and science fiction authors also wrote about flying cars. For a while. I don't see them. Where are my flying cars!?!?!?!
...
Finally! We can reuse all those AOL cds by programming the actual material of the "dots" to reflect light as a "1" or "0".
Wil Mccarthy's web site
Tons of interesting info...
Why do I h8 apple?
The editors seem to have realised nobody actually reads the articles anymore, posters just write whatever springs to mind. So far today we had the earlier $95 dollar Gartner report and now members only access to the article.
Are we seeing the birth of a new site, SlashGossip, made up stuff for nerds to post shit about??
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Sci Fi authors have been pretty successful in predicting emerging trends in science better than most researchers. Gene Roddenberry anyone?
It's quite interesting. McCarthy tells a good story, and in the tradition of good science writing, introduces us to the interesting cast of characters that is working on this stuff.
That said, the book has more of a 'fiction' and less of a 'science' feel to it overall. This is a science in its very early stages and much of the theorizing McCarthy does comes off more as wishful thinking than anything that the data backs up. To his credit, McCarthy points this out and tries to be careful to let you know what's fact and what's speculation.
Overall it's a pretty interesting book though. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys popular-science writing (in the vain of Gleick or Greene) and doesn't mind a little wild speculation thrown in.
For those of you who are interested in the applications for computing, he talks a very little bit about the possibilities in quantum computing that this opens up, but he actually explicitly states that he's not particularly interested in it. As such, most of the book is about matter that can change it's chemical properties and the more material science applications for it.
Ohh, and the last section of the book (actually and appendix) is all about the patent he filed for a device he came up with over the course of writing the book called a quantum well. It makes me a little nervous when someone's already trying to patent stuff that isn't realizable for years and years. Not a call to arms, but something to think about.
foobar/foobar worked for me
registration/sucks
Really, I registered a free account with this combo.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
Programmable matter has been around for years, just look at the T-1000 Terminator
Trolling is a art,
The New Alchemy
Could semiconductor technology do for material science what it has for computing?
Imagine a solid wall that, as the occasion demands, becomes completely transparent or transforms on one side into a giant video screen while the other side becomes either a solar panel or a heat pump that cools a room on a hot day. This is the promise of programmable matter--and it could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.
The idea of programmable matter began to seep into the popular consciousness in recent years through the works of aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy [right], who dubbed the new material wellstone in novels like The Collapsium (Del Rey, 2000). Now McCarthy has written his first nonfiction book about programmable matter, Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked to him about this bleeding-edge technology and how McCarthy himself is helping to transform science fiction into science fact.
What is programmable matter?
Programmable matter is fundamentally a solid-state technology--something that can change its optical, physical, magnetic, or electrical behavior without any moving parts except for electrons or photons. In that sense, there are certain things now that already qualify as programmable matter, like an LCD [liquid-crystal display] screen. This is an assembly of devices, but you can also look at it as carefully arranged material that has the interesting property of changing color under electrical stimulation. By adjusting quantum dots instead of pixels, you can make artificial atoms and adjust a lot more than just the color of the material.
What are quantum dots and how do you use them to make artificial atoms?
A natural atom is a particular means for confining electrons--the positively charged nucleus gathers electrons around it and doesn't let them escape. By confining the electrons, you force them to behave as standing waves. And those standing waves are responsible for nearly all the chemical, electrical, and optical properties that we associate with atoms.
But you don't have to have an atomic nucleus to get that sort of behavior out of electrons; you just have to confine them in a small space. There are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to use the standard techniques of semiconductor chip design to create junctions that will herd electrons into an area of choice, known as a quantum dot. Once confined, the electrons will form a structure known as an artificial atom. With artificial atoms, unlike natural atoms, there is no reason why you can't pump electrons in and out and change their characteristics dynamically, making them programmable.
But if these programmable atoms are buried in a semiconductor substrate, how do they interact with anything? How do you make the entire material behave like it's made out of, say, gold?
With programmable atoms in a substrate, what you are really doing is creating controlled impurities--dopant atoms--so the properties of your semiconductors are going to be very important in determining the final properties of the programmable substance. You can get a very high level of doping with a properly designed quantum dot array and overwhelm the normal behavior of the semiconductor. You can never ignore the fact that the semiconductor is there, but you can change its properties almost beyond recognition.
So would you have to combine different types of artificial atoms to end up with a material whose net behavior is like that of gold?
Probably. An artificial atom of gold-- pseudo-gold--is almost certainly going to be a lot larger than an atom of natural gold. One consequence of this is that its absorption and reflection spectrum will be redshifted, because the electrons are less tightly bound so they will be at lower energies. So even if you could somehow have atoms of pseudo-gold without any substrate, they'd be
from the lead-from-gold dept.
Lead from gold? Don't you mean the other way around? Unless, of course, this is Slashdot's newest money making strategy....
1) Buy lots of gold
2) Turn it into lead
3) ????
4) Profit!
The New Alchemy
Could semiconductor technology do for material science what it has for computing?
Imagine a solid wall that, as the occasion demands, becomes completely transparent or transforms on one side into a giant video screen while the other side becomes either a solar panel or a heat pump that cools a room on a hot day. This is the promise of programmable matter--and it could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.
The idea of programmable matter began to seep into the popular consciousness in recent years through the works of aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy [right], who dubbed the new material wellstone in novels like The Collapsium (Del Rey, 2000). Now McCarthy has written his first nonfiction book about programmable matter, Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked to him about this bleeding-edge technology and how McCarthy himself is helping to transform science fiction into science fact.
What is programmable matter?
Programmable matter is fundamentally a solid-state technology--something that can change its optical, physical, magnetic, or electrical behavior without any moving parts except for electrons or photons. In that sense, there are certain things now that already qualify as programmable matter, like an LCD [liquid-crystal display] screen. This is an assembly of devices, but you can also look at it as carefully arranged material that has the interesting property of changing color under electrical stimulation. By adjusting quantum dots instead of pixels, you can make artificial atoms and adjust a lot more than just the color of the material.
What are quantum dots and how do you use them to make artificial atoms?
A natural atom is a particular means for confining electrons--the positively charged nucleus gathers electrons around it and doesn't let them escape. By confining the electrons, you force them to behave as standing waves. And those standing waves are responsible for nearly all the chemical, electrical, and optical properties that we associate with atoms.
But you don't have to have an atomic nucleus to get that sort of behavior out of electrons; you just have to confine them in a small space. There are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to use the standard techniques of semiconductor chip design to create junctions that will herd electrons into an area of choice, known as a quantum dot. Once confined, the electrons will form a structure known as an artificial atom. With artificial atoms, unlike natural atoms, there is no reason why you can't pump electrons in and out and change their characteristics dynamically, making them programmable.
But if these programmable atoms are buried in a semiconductor substrate, how do they interact with anything? How do you make the entire material behave like it's made out of, say, gold?
With programmable atoms in a substrate, what you are really doing is creating controlled impurities--dopant atoms--so the properties of your semiconductors are going to be very important in determining the final properties of the programmable substance. You can get a very high level of doping with a properly designed quantum dot array and overwhelm the normal behavior of the semiconductor. You can never ignore the fact that the semiconductor is there, but you can change its properties almost beyond recognition.
So would you have to combine different types of artificial atoms to end up with a material whose net behavior is like that of gold?
Probably. An artificial atom of gold-- pseudo-gold--is almost certainly going to be a lot larger than an atom of natural gold. One consequence of this is that its absorption and reflection spectrum will be redshifted, because the electrons are less tightly bound so they will be at lower energies. So even if you could somehow have atoms of pseudo-gold without any substrate,
Technoli
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/apr0 3/book.html
ok... I got it from some search engine...
From an earlier post:
"It should be noted that Tsiolkovsky was talking about geosynchronous orbits around 1900, and radio engineer George O. Smith wrote about communication satellites in "QRM Interplanetary" in 1942. However, Smith's communication satellites/stations were generally placed at Trojan points in order to give line-of-sight between planets around the sun (hence the name of the novel/story collection "Venus Equilateral"). Of course, no one made a movie of one of Smith's books, so everyone forgets him..."
I have nothing against Arthur C. Clarke, but credit should go where it is due. And when life on Europa or diamonds on Jupiter are discovered, THEN it will be a prediction. Until then, it's called "speculation".
I am actually Jonathan Vos Post, former Professor of Astronomy, Active Member of Science Fiction Writers of America, and software geek for 37 years (since 1966). I am extremely impressed by both the fiction and nonfiction on this subject by Wil McCarthy.
It happens that, as a side-effect of my writing perhaps the first Nanotechnology Ph.D. dissertation ("Molecular Cybernetics", 1977), I coined the terms of "programmable matter" and of "smart matter" by 1980. I used these terms in discussions I had with CS Professor/Science Fiction author Vernor Vinge, when the vingemiester was writing "Fire Upon the Deep."
I'm delighted that Wil McCarthy has taken the subject further, in his article in "Analog", his IEEE publication, and his wonderful novels.
He's such a good "hard Science Fiction" author that I feel a serious twinge of jealousy when I read him, same as I do for Sir Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, Greg Benford, and a handfull of others.
Go you: read, and be enlightened.
Jonathan Vos Post
magicdragon.com
over 10,000,000 hits in 2002 alone
proposing the application of quantum dot technology on a large scale thereby allowing one to control properties of materials at will.
Imagine the pornographic possibilities!
Greg Bear has had an idea along these lines,
in his book "Moving Mars".
Thought you guys might find this interesting as well, since the page is gone....
t ml
http://pm.bu.edu/
http://www.wilmccarthy.com/pmfaq.htm
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/atoms.h
Arthur C. Clarke was NOT the first person to propose relay satellites. He adapted the idea of a geosynchronous satellite from an older story by an obscure SF author whose name escapes me now. The author wrote a story describing a relay station put up on an asteroid to act as a bridge between Earth and Venusian colonies when the sun was in the middle. Essentially, the same concept Clarke used.
"Don't bother me with that pocket calculator stuff" - Deep Thought
Can anyone here confirm or deny this?
Happy people make bad consumers.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
. . . I think. The book might have been _Venus Equilateral_.
A very elderly Smith attended one of the first SF conventions I went to. What I best remember about the con was the shameful way a young snot of a fan treated him when he was given an honorary spot on a panel.
The first time I heard of this was along with nanotechnology and the twins have haunted my view of the future since. The current battle about genetics looks like kids stuff when you compare it to nanotechnology and programmable matter. Imagine if you could create an implant that'd let you manipulate individual atoms and add in your own quasi-atoms. It'd be especially cool if you could hack your own body with that technology. It makes most of our concepts of magic sound like nothing at all. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Well if it's years off, the patent will have expired by then - and the Patent Office will have no choice but see the prior art when somebody gets around to trying to patent it again.
That is only true if the practical applications are at least 20 years after the date of filing, something that you cannot be certain of (though the well documented chilling effects of patents on innovation would lead one to expect that this might indeed become the case, as a direct result of the issuence of this patent).
It is appalling that someone can think of a speculative idea and patent it, then wait for someone to actually do the hard work of inventing a useful product before gouging them for royalties. Not only is there no incentive for anyone other than the arm-chair patent holder to develop this idea (and even were he qualified to do so, he is but one person), there is actually disincentive to do so, as the end result of the toil necessary to create such a remarkable device will be a lawsuit from a science fiction author in the peanut gallar.
The previous poster said this "wasn't a call to arms." Well, it damn well should be. Unfortunately we have cultivated apathy to a high art, and appear unable to move ourselves out of that helpless state of mind even when things like this (not to mention software patents, which threaten innovation and free software for all of us) repeatedly kick us all directly in the face.
Our masters, in conditioning us to be compliant and uninvolved, untroublesome, quiet consumers have done their work well...to the profound detriment of us all.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Probably because McCarthy is a last name, and it would be odd if old Joseph were the only one to have it.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
One of the things he talks about is how the virtual atoms can only exist right on top of the silicon substrate... Why can't the "atoms" that you are creating resemble more silicon substrate, complete with wires and all that it needs to function, and then sitting on top of that is yeat another virtual layer, ad nauseum until you create wahtever you want. All you would need is a little chip of "seed" substrate and you could "replicate" stuff... It wouldn't exist as soon as the power shuts off, but it would seem to exist until that point, right? So pseudo replication.