Whoever submitted this wrote an extremely misleading write up.
Other people have pointed out, the article claims that this has the potential to get 30% of the energy from the sun (as opposed to DOES get...). Even that is wrong.
This technology gives plastic-based photovoltaics access to 30% more of the power output from the sun. Notice that is NOT 30% more than today's silicon based solar cells, just 30% more than the plastic.
Furthermore, this stuff has an efficiency of 3% at best (from the actual Nature paper).
Now that I've bummed you out, let me tell you why this is still really cool.
The technology involves joining quantum dots with semiconducting polymers. By changing the size of the dots you mix in, the polymer will absorb different frequencies of radiation. Thus, you can custom make photvoltaics for a very specific band, or a very wide band with one material. For instance, they created plasics that have a photocurrent when hit with infared radiation (specifically 980nm, 1200nm, and 1355nm). Previously, plastic photodetectors only went up to 800nm. Also, the 3% efficency might not seem like much, but that's around 1000 times better than what was done previously with these types of systems. The only caveat is that it was 3% for an infared laser, not a wide band.
This stuff is still basic research, it will get a lot better and may one day power your cell phone or house, but don't expect it out this summer.
Why does a game like WOW have to behave like a well balanced economy? All of his points about inflation and ending up with an abundance of currency after sufficient time make sense. I agree that at a certain point people will be running around with effectively infinite money, what's the big deal?
This is a social game. If you were to start playing in six months, the smart thing to do would be to join a guild with some high level characters and get them to finance your new character. It would be idiotic in WOW to buy money off of Ebay, when it will be essentially free in game. This is, I think, as it should be. The developers at Blizzard should be seeking to keep it this way, and not ruin the social aspect of the game by attempting to run an economics simulator.
This is something I hear a lot from people outside of science. Who get's to decide what to name a scientific discipline? Scientests?
Nanotechnology in science was never just really small robotics. I do put the start of nanotechnology a long time ago, specifically with the invention of nanoscale titanium dioxide, that stuff which makes paint brighter and sunscreen better. Five or ten years ago, the big push in nanotechnology was finding out what we could already make which would be that small and still interesting. (A great example is carbon nanotubes. They were probably made by Edison, and they were probably seen as early as the 1970's but no paid them any attention until 1991.) Along the way, we've found some things which may be usefull right now, this is why there are so many simple nanotechnology products coming out right now, such as pants and sunscreen.
And before you ask, yes I've read and own Feynman's talk and Drexler's books. Many of the tools they predicted are around today. It turns out they've been done in other ways than they thought they would be. What do you think was important to them, the process or the result? What is important to space settlement, that people get there on a chemical rocket, or that they get there at all?
There are a lot more problems with working with molecules than early theorists thought. For example, I work with nanoscale electronics. I can make a transistor one molecule wide, but it costs about $10,000 by the time you factor everything in, and you only get one. Is that really going to be commercially worthwhile right now? It's worth much more to me to use that as a tool to do something unusual.
There are other, more important things we need to do than try to sell the public our lab tools to justify calling our work nanotechnology. Now that the initial excitement over working with molecules is over, people are looking for things to do which were not possible before. It's silly to argue about the method by which we reach our goals, and what to name those methods, when we all share those same goals.
You're right. I meant high funding relative to other science projects. The investment in fusion over the years has been substantial, even from the US government, but nowhere near the level of investment in war.
Unfortunately, most politicians are incapable of thinking more than 2 years ahead.
Fusion is supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. It has been through times of high funding and no funding, and still survives. We have been working on fusion for almost 50 years now. Short of the fall of civilization (insert Bush joke here), it will happen.
The fusion projects around the world are much, much larger than the Manhattan project in terms of manpower and money spent. Fusion as a science and a beurocracy is much larger than any one man, even Bush.
If you're looking for something to be negative about, read the above again. We've been doing this for a long time, with many of our best minds and engineers, and it still doesn't work. Every 5 years they predict it's 10 years off, and it's been that way for generations now. If all that effort were put into wind, solar or even gyroscopic power, would those technologies already be mature?
This model is the same which is used in science research. The people in the lab, doing the research are all around 25. Once you've put in 10 or 15 years as a lab rat, you're expected to move on to management (or professorship), and out of the lab.
My boss can get things done much faster than I can, and has likely already solved the problems I face. Why does science take its most experianced workers out of direct research?
While my boss may be a better lab worker than I, the most efficient use of his time is in recruiting, fund generation and training. He knows what equipment we'll need, how much it will cost and can train half a dozen of us to use it. These are things I simply cannot do right now, yet still must be done.
I don't know about the game industry, but I would expect something similar. The best game coders out there go on to be the best game company managers, while those who can't cut it end up somewhere else.
Having a 50% dropout rate in 10 years seems pretty good. (The 3% number is skewed due to the massive growth in the game industry over the last 10 years.) That means 50% of the people are able and willing to do what is asked. How many people start as pre-meds and then make it through med school? It sure isn't 50%. I would guess maybe 5% of those who start in physics (my field) make it 10 years.
To use your own argument: Don't discount the type of knowledge that comes with long term work in a field. Sometimes that knowledge is that you're no good at it, and sometimes that knowledge is best used by passing it on to as many people as possible, rather than using it. In jobs which are very important (MD, police) or very popular (game programmer, actor) the work force is stressed to get only the best. There are people who can work harder, and longer than others. They are statistical outliers for which output does not much fall with increasing stress.
Is it immoral to work people like this? Yeah, but you have to ask why the people work so hard. Which is what the original poster what talking about. These programmers can quit whenever they'd like, but something is keeping them there despite the long hours and high stress, and it's not the money.
Like many other things in life, if it's worth trying and even if it's not, we've tried it in California. We already have a city without borders, we call it Los Angeles.
Joking aside, even as an idea or culture, one could argue that Los Angeles is world wide.
Libertarians differ most from other political parties in the US in their interpretation of the constitution. The libertarian party could be said to follow most the idea of "original intent".
For example, when the US constitution's second amendment was written (the right to bear arms), it was intended to allow any citizen of the US to own a gun for personal and national defense. As long as that amendment is in the constitution, a libertarian will argue that the government has no right to issue permits, the permit is already implied by the constitution.
Similarly, there bill of rights reserves all rights not listed in the constitution to the states and individuals. That's the key. This is also where the historical concept of divine rights comes in. Badnarik is not talking about some 20th century evangelical concept of divine rights, he's talking about the historical concept of divine rights, which is basically all of them.
In the Constitution, we have given up some specific rights. You must pay your taxes, and you are subject to common law. In Libertarian thought, the Constitution and the methods therein are some kind of holy scripture (this time in the 20th century evangelical sense).
Everyone must follow the laws, and everyone must be held responsible, especially the government. Therefore the government can only do what the constitution says it can do, and nothing more.
There is nothing in the constitution about illegal drugs (save prohibition, and its repeal), thus there should be no FEDERALLY determined illegal drugs. Nor for that matter, any regulation of medical drugs.
I don't think I would call the libertarian viewpoint "moral" or "nice", but it is definitely "ethical".
In any case, you pose very interesting questions and I really should be getting back to physics as well, what with midterms to grade and all. Do all of us a favor and don't forget about politics and these questions when you are a scientest, we all need to think these thoughts.
basic scientific research commercial launches/coordination military launches big space projects
The way I see it, the basic scientific research area of NASA will eventually be handled if not by the NSF, by something very much like it. The various NASA research centers are pretty much like the national labs already.
The commercial launches may one day be handled by private enterprise, but there will always be regulation which goes along with them. This area could more easily be handled in the future by something like the FAA.
The military launches really should be handled by the military.
That leaves the big space projects. This really can't be taken away. There has to be someone out there who will coordinate the truly crazy space projects. Who exept NASA (working with other government space agencies: ESA, etc) will build gigantic orbiting particle accellerators? Helping to coordinate multinational projects is really going to be the role of NASA and other governmental space agencies in the future.
Right now, one of the biggest impediments to big science projects (ITER comes to mind) is getting all the parties involved simply to agree on what they are doing.
Semiconductors were discovered in 1874, and it wasn't until 1948 that the transistor was discovered, it took a few more decades to really commercialize it. On the whole, roughly 100 years from the discovery of semiconductors to widespread commercial use.
We first developed a device (STM) to image and move individual atoms in 1987. It would not surprise me in the least if it took 100 years for us to come up with something which would be widely commercially available based on atomic scale manufacturing. Have some patience.
I agree that the term "nano" gets thrown around a lot more than it should be, but how do you know one of these nano-gadgets won't be leading the field in the future? I realize that fact that new people and ideas have entered the field pisses some people off, but if an organic chemist wants to call his work on artificial muscle polymers "nanotechnology" I can't find a reason to argue with him.
On the other hand, critisizing the Millipede project for not being "cool enough" is like complaining that the Manhattan project failed to develop the H-bomb. It's a major accomplishment which puts us one step closer in that direction to industrial molecular assembly. Read that article you linked to again, and perhaps a review of Atomic Force Microscopy or Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy. The Millipede project IS nanotechnolgy, and it IS going toward that dream of nano-level assembly.
It's funny, most physicists I've talked to about this disagree with me. (Although you're the first from Europe, I have a friend at Delft who just blames my obsession on the poor US education system.)
Perhaps what we do now is the best way, I can't really say I've seen anything better. You make some really good points.
My only counter would be that many people are not working on simple problems anymore. The ideas of Hamiltonian mechanics would be very useful to anyone doing molecular biology or organic chemistry. You need that good classical mechanics basis to get to the quantum or electrodynamics needed by everyone from a chemist to an electrical engineer. I'm not saying they need QED or anything, just that they should be able to know where an energy minimum comes from. If we can do that without resorting to advanced math, then I'm wrong, but I would be happy about it.
If we don't teach them that, I guess that's ok too, more jobs for us when they get to the complex problems.
You make some good points, especially about terminology, and they are a lot of the same points professors make to me when I complain to them about this, so I suppose you're in good company.
I agree that telling students a particle follows a "path over which the action of a particle's motion is extremized" is crap. I also think it's crap to teach someone that a=f/m, now go plug in some numbers. I think students should be taught to minimize energies, and that force is not some mysterious quantity that's given at the beggining of the problem. Maybe that can be done easily without resorting to more advanced mathmatics?
I'm probably wrong about a lot of this. There have been a few professors I've talked to who claimed to have tried teaching "real" physics to bio majors, and according to them it was too much work for everyone and not worth it. Perhaps physics is just something you really have to want to learn to learn properly. But is every bio textbook author going to get a physicist to edit their book? If we focus on the real basics and spoon feed our students, will that be enough? I think the real core of physics, how a physicist thinks, is important enough to try and teach it in other fields. I doubt anyone would really disagree with that, but the big question is what is the best way to do that, and maybe what we've got is it.
That your average engineer, chemist or other science-minded college-educated person is not at least comfortable with Lagrangian mechanics is a failure of physics education.
In physics we generally don't think in terms of Newtons Laws, but rather in terms of the action and fields.
In my view, the lower level college physics classes which teach 18th century physics are a complete waste of time (as the review points out, all those laws fall out of more fundamental principals). The engineering students who are forced to take physics are not even given the chance to learn "real" physics, and the physics and other science majors who take it will simply be told to forget it and learn a better way of thinking a year later.
I'm always asking people in my department (I'm a physics grad student) why in the world we teach these useless classes. Generally the defense is that people wouldn't learn the concepts if we taught them the real way, that the math would be too hard, and people would get caught up in it.
They forget what it was like as an undergrad. Physics can be hard, even old, 18th century physics. When I've taught physics, people always get caught up in the math. The best we can do is to at least teach the right way, and introduce the right concepts. The math can be taught, packaged or explained.
There has been very little effort that I have seen to put real physics concepts in a package which is understandable by your average freshman biology student. This book is obviously no exception. It does not have to be this hard, and physics does not have to be only for physicists. Why do we insist on complicated terminology and crazy sounding descriptions?
I know that a lot of engineers and others out there have had more modern classical physics classes. Were they any good? Was your education in physics enlightening or frusterating? These issues really bug me, and I hope some of you out there have had better than I've seen.
I believe Molyneux wants us to enjoy what we are, not hide from it. Why deny yourself? Regardless of inner voices or conflicts, our actions define us as good or evil. It's an externally, artificially applied label, but still, there it is, a fact of humanity. It is not the individual who decides what is good or evil, but the society. It is up to the individual to make choices and actions regardless of that definition. Molyneux is just making that obvious.
Plus, it's a video game, come on.
(By, they way, you may not see beings with horns and wings, but you probably don't live in Los Angeles. There are people here who revel in this.)
While I agree that nanotechnology needs to have some oversight to make sure everything is kosher, I think we have a lot more to worry about from biology.
I work at making carbon nanotube chemical sensors. The "nano" part is grown right on the chip, and promply pinned down with metal lithography, thereby protecting it from any living tissue which might come by and try to hurt it.
My biology inclined fiance is working on using natural proteins as targeted drug delivery systems. Delivering cancer drugs only to cancer cells and that sort of thing. Very noble.
While the world seems intent on debating the "ethics" of my very small wires, no one seems to question the motives behind an undetectable, targeted drug delivery system (using natural protiens to deliver steroids only to the muscles?).
What with atomic bombs and gene patents we scientests have done a poor job convincing the public we know what we're doing. If we find something which occurs "naturally" it will be viewed by the public in a better light than something which was developed.
First of all, if you're in science for the money, you're not going to be getting that PhD. It's simply too hard and too much work to get through unless you really love it. That aside, there are good economic reasons for going into science, particularly physics.
For example, I am currently a physics graduate student. I get paid a little less than $20K a year, but have no fees.
My brother is going to law school. He gets paid nothing and will have around $150K in loans to pay off when he's done.
The balance is that he'll get paid more after he gets out, right? What happens if he can't find a good job? Not all lawyers (or MBAs for that matter) make a lot of money. What happens if he can't find any job? Unemployment among physics PhDs is always very low, almost never higher than 4%. Can MBAs or lawyers say the same?
The numbers of $40K a year for a post-doc may be right for biologists and organic chemists, but many of those guys are being replaced by robots and combinatorial chemistry. That's led to some poor job markets for them. Here are some actual numbers (as opposed to vague generalizations). While you don't make six figures as a physicist, you're doing pretty well.
When it comes down to it, science is changing now in the same way everything else is. Computers are cheap, easy to use and more powerfull, allowing students to be replaced by a few good Labview programs. The revolution in nanoscale characterization allowed by AFM and STM has lead to new, better ways of doing chemistry and biology. Should science NOT use these tools because it means some people are now obsolete?
The article is right on when it takes Universities to task for not teaching the skills which will be needed. Grad student labor is cheap, and some of this equipment is expensive. It's not even that more money is needed. It just needs to be spent smarter. Buying used equipment, testing prototype technology and forming collaborations with other groups to pool resources are ways of providing your research group with cutting edge tools (all of which are used in the lab I work in). Of course, there's nothing wrong with building your own equipment either (what I am spending a Saturday doing, after posting here, of course). In any case, it's dishonest for a University to hand out PhDs to people who are not able to get jobs for lack of training.
As a solid state physicist, working with nanotubes, who is also a member of the SCA, I found your post quite interesting.
The first problem is that nanotubes don't grow into toroids. They can form spirals that look like toroids under any but the most powerfull microscopes, but these spirals will unravel very quickly. That point is a weak rebuttal, because we could probably close those rings with an electron or ion beam if we really wanted to.
Also, keep in mind that there are very, very few molecules which are "stiff" all by themselves. Carbon nanotubes are definitely not one of them. It would be like making chainmail out of very strong cooked noodles. Really what you want is more than the 4 links provided by chainmail. By tangling these up, we can link up to many times more other nanotubes than by controllable copying of a two dimensional nearest-neighbor lattice. For example, if we have a three dimensional cubic lattice of interlocking rings, we have 6 links in a nearest neighbor (chainmail) case, and 14 in a nearest and next-nearest neighbor case, increasing redundancy and bonding energy. We could keep going by weaving these things together. In a really tight weave (or a huge tangle like what these nanotube fibers really are), you may have one fiber connected to hundreds of others.
Except for one more issue, all the weaving done right now might still theoretically be made stronger by closing the ends of the nantubes to avoid unravelling (so your general idea is good). If stress is put on a bend in a nanotube, it will lead to a "5-7" defect where two hexagonal rings become one ring of 5, and one of 7, inducing a 15 degree permanant bend in the tube. These defects lead to nanotubes which have at best 50% the tensile strength of a non-defective tube, but often more like 15%. That's why so much work is being put into aligned nanotube fibers. These fibers have been measured to be stronger than any other known material. If these aligned fibers are then woven, they are lighter and stronger than Kevlar. Coincidentally, the molecularly woven (tangled) nanotube fibers made by these guys at MIT are not much stronger than generic clothing fiber. The key is to weave the fibers macroscopically and allow the nanotubes to bend less than 15 degrees on a molecular scale.
The nanotube thread we can make now is not strong enough to work. What we need is a way to "weld" nanotubes together without introducing massive defects (that's key). There's a significant amount of physics to be done there.
On the other hand, we've been able to increase the size of the nanotubes we've been able to grow an order of magnitude every few years. We're up to centimeters now for one, single tube, and the process is likely scalable (as in, bigger furnace, longer tubes).
To get an idea of how hard this would be:
62000 miles is about 1*10^14 micrometers,
There are about 3.2*10^7 seconds in a year,
nanotubes grow at around 300 micrometers a second,
so it would take 10,000 years to grow that elevator out of continuous tubes (unless we're way, way off on the speed).
I'm not sure about 15 years, but I think we'll get it done sometime in the next 100 with some sort of welding technique, and in the long run, it's going to cost a lot more than anyone now thinks.
Decaf coffee is (or at least can be) produced from "real" coffee by soaking it in supercritical carbon dioxide. Last I checked, that was relatively cheap, effective, environmentally friendly and has nothing to do with genetic engineering.
This metaphor is seriously flawed. In a working biological system DNA can't be hidden, obscured, enciphered or otherwise made unreadable. The DNA which was modified is right there for everyone to see. In software, it is extraordinarily difficult to take a working program and reverse engineer the source. Even if a company owns some genetic code, it's still accessible to any genetic researcher.
Within the next 15 years, it will become trivial to quickly determine the base pair code of any strand of DNA, and comparisons between related species will be fast and easy. This idea that a defect with "wheat 2.0" is the same as Windows bugs is silly. Academic researchers can and will test patented DNA and improve it.
As a physicist, I feel the same way about science fiction. It got me interested enough in science to consider it a career, but looking at it now, I'm shocked by how wrong it is.
I've got a friend who is a lawyer now, and the drudgery of taking depositions and filling out forms is nothing like the mock-trial compititions which convinced him to go to law school.
Perhaps if we had a psychologist or someone similar here, they could explain to us why it is all the "fun" stuff that gets us hooked on a subject turns out to be so wrong.
You might want to use a few different examples than lead and mercury, because those ARE regular chemicals, elements even. We've had health problems with those for hundreds of years. While that is a problem we'll have associated with nanotechnology, it's not something NEW to worry about, as it's a general electronics manufacturing problem.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, just saying that you've got two problems here. One is the industrial-age old problem of metal pollutants, the other is the brand new problem of unknown nanoscale materials.
There are many many new materials discovered every week which have unknown health and environmental effects. Where do nanotubes go when they're not used in a device, and how long do they stay there? We don't know. We need to be active in researching these things and advertising the results.
Really though, get some better examples because it sounds a little silly to call solder a nanomaterial.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever submitted this wrote an extremely misleading write up.
Other people have pointed out, the article claims that this has the potential to get 30% of the energy from the sun (as opposed to DOES get...). Even that is wrong.
This technology gives plastic-based photovoltaics access to 30% more of the power output from the sun. Notice that is NOT 30% more than today's silicon based solar cells, just 30% more than the plastic.
Furthermore, this stuff has an efficiency of 3% at best (from the actual Nature paper).
Now that I've bummed you out, let me tell you why this is still really cool.
The technology involves joining quantum dots with semiconducting polymers. By changing the size of the dots you mix in, the polymer will absorb different frequencies of radiation. Thus, you can custom make photvoltaics for a very specific band, or a very wide band with one material. For instance, they created plasics that have a photocurrent when hit with infared radiation (specifically 980nm, 1200nm, and 1355nm). Previously, plastic photodetectors only went up to 800nm. Also, the 3% efficency might not seem like much, but that's around 1000 times better than what was done previously with these types of systems. The only caveat is that it was 3% for an infared laser, not a wide band.
This stuff is still basic research, it will get a lot better and may one day power your cell phone or house, but don't expect it out this summer.
Why does a game like WOW have to behave like a well balanced economy? All of his points about inflation and ending up with an abundance of currency after sufficient time make sense. I agree that at a certain point people will be running around with effectively infinite money, what's the big deal?
This is a social game. If you were to start playing in six months, the smart thing to do would be to join a guild with some high level characters and get them to finance your new character. It would be idiotic in WOW to buy money off of Ebay, when it will be essentially free in game. This is, I think, as it should be. The developers at Blizzard should be seeking to keep it this way, and not ruin the social aspect of the game by attempting to run an economics simulator.
This is something I hear a lot from people outside of science. Who get's to decide what to name a scientific discipline? Scientests?
Nanotechnology in science was never just really small robotics. I do put the start of nanotechnology a long time ago, specifically with the invention of nanoscale titanium dioxide, that stuff which makes paint brighter and sunscreen better. Five or ten years ago, the big push in nanotechnology was finding out what we could already make which would be that small and still interesting. (A great example is carbon nanotubes. They were probably made by Edison, and they were probably seen as early as the 1970's but no paid them any attention until 1991.) Along the way, we've found some things which may be usefull right now, this is why there are so many simple nanotechnology products coming out right now, such as pants and sunscreen.
And before you ask, yes I've read and own Feynman's talk and Drexler's books. Many of the tools they predicted are around today. It turns out they've been done in other ways than they thought they would be. What do you think was important to them, the process or the result? What is important to space settlement, that people get there on a chemical rocket, or that they get there at all?
There are a lot more problems with working with molecules than early theorists thought. For example, I work with nanoscale electronics. I can make a transistor one molecule wide, but it costs about $10,000 by the time you factor everything in, and you only get one. Is that really going to be commercially worthwhile right now? It's worth much more to me to use that as a tool to do something unusual.
There are other, more important things we need to do than try to sell the public our lab tools to justify calling our work nanotechnology. Now that the initial excitement over working with molecules is over, people are looking for things to do which were not possible before. It's silly to argue about the method by which we reach our goals, and what to name those methods, when we all share those same goals.
You're right. I meant high funding relative to other science projects. The investment in fusion over the years has been substantial, even from the US government, but nowhere near the level of investment in war.
Unfortunately, most politicians are incapable of thinking more than 2 years ahead.
Ha!
Fusion is supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. It has been through times of high funding and no funding, and still survives. We have been working on fusion for almost 50 years now. Short of the fall of civilization (insert Bush joke here), it will happen.
The fusion projects around the world are much, much larger than the Manhattan project in terms of manpower and money spent. Fusion as a science and a beurocracy is much larger than any one man, even Bush.
If you're looking for something to be negative about, read the above again. We've been doing this for a long time, with many of our best minds and engineers, and it still doesn't work. Every 5 years they predict it's 10 years off, and it's been that way for generations now. If all that effort were put into wind, solar or even gyroscopic power, would those technologies already be mature?
This model is the same which is used in science research. The people in the lab, doing the research are all around 25. Once you've put in 10 or 15 years as a lab rat, you're expected to move on to management (or professorship), and out of the lab.
My boss can get things done much faster than I can, and has likely already solved the problems I face. Why does science take its most experianced workers out of direct research?
While my boss may be a better lab worker than I, the most efficient use of his time is in recruiting, fund generation and training. He knows what equipment we'll need, how much it will cost and can train half a dozen of us to use it. These are things I simply cannot do right now, yet still must be done.
I don't know about the game industry, but I would expect something similar. The best game coders out there go on to be the best game company managers, while those who can't cut it end up somewhere else.
Having a 50% dropout rate in 10 years seems pretty good. (The 3% number is skewed due to the massive growth in the game industry over the last 10 years.) That means 50% of the people are able and willing to do what is asked. How many people start as pre-meds and then make it through med school? It sure isn't 50%. I would guess maybe 5% of those who start in physics (my field) make it 10 years.
To use your own argument: Don't discount the type of knowledge that comes with long term work in a field. Sometimes that knowledge is that you're no good at it, and sometimes that knowledge is best used by passing it on to as many people as possible, rather than using it. In jobs which are very important (MD, police) or very popular (game programmer, actor) the work force is stressed to get only the best. There are people who can work harder, and longer than others. They are statistical outliers for which output does not much fall with increasing stress.
Is it immoral to work people like this? Yeah, but you have to ask why the people work so hard. Which is what the original poster what talking about. These programmers can quit whenever they'd like, but something is keeping them there despite the long hours and high stress, and it's not the money.
Like many other things in life, if it's worth trying and even if it's not, we've tried it in California. We already have a city without borders, we call it Los Angeles.
Joking aside, even as an idea or culture, one could argue that Los Angeles is world wide.
Libertarians differ most from other political parties in the US in their interpretation of the constitution. The libertarian party could be said to follow most the idea of "original intent".
For example, when the US constitution's second amendment was written (the right to bear arms), it was intended to allow any citizen of the US to own a gun for personal and national defense. As long as that amendment is in the constitution, a libertarian will argue that the government has no right to issue permits, the permit is already implied by the constitution.
Similarly, there bill of rights reserves all rights not listed in the constitution to the states and individuals. That's the key. This is also where the historical concept of divine rights comes in. Badnarik is not talking about some 20th century evangelical concept of divine rights, he's talking about the historical concept of divine rights, which is basically all of them.
In the Constitution, we have given up some specific rights. You must pay your taxes, and you are subject to common law. In Libertarian thought, the Constitution and the methods therein are some kind of holy scripture (this time in the 20th century evangelical sense).
Everyone must follow the laws, and everyone must be held responsible, especially the government. Therefore the government can only do what the constitution says it can do, and nothing more.
There is nothing in the constitution about illegal drugs (save prohibition, and its repeal), thus there should be no FEDERALLY determined illegal drugs. Nor for that matter, any regulation of medical drugs.
I don't think I would call the libertarian viewpoint "moral" or "nice", but it is definitely "ethical".
In any case, you pose very interesting questions and I really should be getting back to physics as well, what with midterms to grade and all. Do all of us a favor and don't forget about politics and these questions when you are a scientest, we all need to think these thoughts.
I was thinking more along the lines of Sea Launch than United Space Alliance.
I didn't know the Air Force was so involved. Thanks.
NASA has a bunch of different responsibilities:
basic scientific research
commercial launches/coordination
military launches
big space projects
The way I see it, the basic scientific research area of NASA will eventually be handled if not by the NSF, by something very much like it. The various NASA research centers are pretty much like the national labs already.
The commercial launches may one day be handled by private enterprise, but there will always be regulation which goes along with them. This area could more easily be handled in the future by something like the FAA.
The military launches really should be handled by the military.
That leaves the big space projects. This really can't be taken away. There has to be someone out there who will coordinate the truly crazy space projects. Who exept NASA (working with other government space agencies: ESA, etc) will build gigantic orbiting particle accellerators? Helping to coordinate multinational projects is really going to be the role of NASA and other governmental space agencies in the future.
Right now, one of the biggest impediments to big science projects (ITER comes to mind) is getting all the parties involved simply to agree on what they are doing.
Semiconductors were discovered in 1874, and it wasn't until 1948 that the transistor was discovered, it took a few more decades to really commercialize it. On the whole, roughly 100 years from the discovery of semiconductors to widespread commercial use.
We first developed a device (STM) to image and move individual atoms in 1987. It would not surprise me in the least if it took 100 years for us to come up with something which would be widely commercially available based on atomic scale manufacturing. Have some patience.
I agree that the term "nano" gets thrown around a lot more than it should be, but how do you know one of these nano-gadgets won't be leading the field in the future? I realize that fact that new people and ideas have entered the field pisses some people off, but if an organic chemist wants to call his work on artificial muscle polymers "nanotechnology" I can't find a reason to argue with him.
On the other hand, critisizing the Millipede project for not being "cool enough" is like complaining that the Manhattan project failed to develop the H-bomb. It's a major accomplishment which puts us one step closer in that direction to industrial molecular assembly. Read that article you linked to again, and perhaps a review of Atomic Force Microscopy or Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy. The Millipede project IS nanotechnolgy, and it IS going toward that dream of nano-level assembly.
It's funny, most physicists I've talked to about this disagree with me. (Although you're the first from Europe, I have a friend at Delft who just blames my obsession on the poor US education system.)
Perhaps what we do now is the best way, I can't really say I've seen anything better. You make some really good points.
My only counter would be that many people are not working on simple problems anymore. The ideas of Hamiltonian mechanics would be very useful to anyone doing molecular biology or organic chemistry. You need that good classical mechanics basis to get to the quantum or electrodynamics needed by everyone from a chemist to an electrical engineer. I'm not saying they need QED or anything, just that they should be able to know where an energy minimum comes from. If we can do that without resorting to advanced math, then I'm wrong, but I would be happy about it.
If we don't teach them that, I guess that's ok too, more jobs for us when they get to the complex problems.
You make some good points, especially about terminology, and they are a lot of the same points professors make to me when I complain to them about this, so I suppose you're in good company.
I agree that telling students a particle follows a "path over which the action of a particle's motion is extremized" is crap. I also think it's crap to teach someone that a=f/m, now go plug in some numbers. I think students should be taught to minimize energies, and that force is not some mysterious quantity that's given at the beggining of the problem. Maybe that can be done easily without resorting to more advanced mathmatics?
I'm probably wrong about a lot of this. There have been a few professors I've talked to who claimed to have tried teaching "real" physics to bio majors, and according to them it was too much work for everyone and not worth it. Perhaps physics is just something you really have to want to learn to learn properly. But is every bio textbook author going to get a physicist to edit their book? If we focus on the real basics and spoon feed our students, will that be enough? I think the real core of physics, how a physicist thinks, is important enough to try and teach it in other fields. I doubt anyone would really disagree with that, but the big question is what is the best way to do that, and maybe what we've got is it.
That your average engineer, chemist or other science-minded college-educated person is not at least comfortable with Lagrangian mechanics is a failure of physics education.
In physics we generally don't think in terms of Newtons Laws, but rather in terms of the action and fields.
In my view, the lower level college physics classes which teach 18th century physics are a complete waste of time (as the review points out, all those laws fall out of more fundamental principals). The engineering students who are forced to take physics are not even given the chance to learn "real" physics, and the physics and other science majors who take it will simply be told to forget it and learn a better way of thinking a year later.
I'm always asking people in my department (I'm a physics grad student) why in the world we teach these useless classes. Generally the defense is that people wouldn't learn the concepts if we taught them the real way, that the math would be too hard, and people would get caught up in it.
They forget what it was like as an undergrad. Physics can be hard, even old, 18th century physics. When I've taught physics, people always get caught up in the math. The best we can do is to at least teach the right way, and introduce the right concepts. The math can be taught, packaged or explained.
There has been very little effort that I have seen to put real physics concepts in a package which is understandable by your average freshman biology student. This book is obviously no exception. It does not have to be this hard, and physics does not have to be only for physicists. Why do we insist on complicated terminology and crazy sounding descriptions?
I know that a lot of engineers and others out there have had more modern classical physics classes. Were they any good? Was your education in physics enlightening or frusterating? These issues really bug me, and I hope some of you out there have had better than I've seen.
I believe Molyneux wants us to enjoy what we are, not hide from it. Why deny yourself? Regardless of inner voices or conflicts, our actions define us as good or evil. It's an externally, artificially applied label, but still, there it is, a fact of humanity. It is not the individual who decides what is good or evil, but the society. It is up to the individual to make choices and actions regardless of that definition. Molyneux is just making that obvious.
Plus, it's a video game, come on.
(By, they way, you may not see beings with horns and wings, but you probably don't live in Los Angeles. There are people here who revel in this.)
While I agree that nanotechnology needs to have some oversight to make sure everything is kosher, I think we have a lot more to worry about from biology.
I work at making carbon nanotube chemical sensors. The "nano" part is grown right on the chip, and promply pinned down with metal lithography, thereby protecting it from any living tissue which might come by and try to hurt it.
My biology inclined fiance is working on using natural proteins as targeted drug delivery systems. Delivering cancer drugs only to cancer cells and that sort of thing. Very noble.
While the world seems intent on debating the "ethics" of my very small wires, no one seems to question the motives behind an undetectable, targeted drug delivery system (using natural protiens to deliver steroids only to the muscles?).
What with atomic bombs and gene patents we scientests have done a poor job convincing the public we know what we're doing. If we find something which occurs "naturally" it will be viewed by the public in a better light than something which was developed.
Damn, you've figured us out!
For example, I am currently a physics graduate student. I get paid a little less than $20K a year, but have no fees.
My brother is going to law school. He gets paid nothing and will have around $150K in loans to pay off when he's done.
The balance is that he'll get paid more after he gets out, right? What happens if he can't find a good job? Not all lawyers (or MBAs for that matter) make a lot of money. What happens if he can't find any job? Unemployment among physics PhDs is always very low, almost never higher than 4%. Can MBAs or lawyers say the same?
The numbers of $40K a year for a post-doc may be right for biologists and organic chemists, but many of those guys are being replaced by robots and combinatorial chemistry. That's led to some poor job markets for them. Here are some actual numbers (as opposed to vague generalizations). While you don't make six figures as a physicist, you're doing pretty well.
When it comes down to it, science is changing now in the same way everything else is. Computers are cheap, easy to use and more powerfull, allowing students to be replaced by a few good Labview programs. The revolution in nanoscale characterization allowed by AFM and STM has lead to new, better ways of doing chemistry and biology. Should science NOT use these tools because it means some people are now obsolete?
The article is right on when it takes Universities to task for not teaching the skills which will be needed. Grad student labor is cheap, and some of this equipment is expensive. It's not even that more money is needed. It just needs to be spent smarter. Buying used equipment, testing prototype technology and forming collaborations with other groups to pool resources are ways of providing your research group with cutting edge tools (all of which are used in the lab I work in). Of course, there's nothing wrong with building your own equipment either (what I am spending a Saturday doing, after posting here, of course). In any case, it's dishonest for a University to hand out PhDs to people who are not able to get jobs for lack of training.
As a solid state physicist, working with nanotubes, who is also a member of the SCA, I found your post quite interesting.
The first problem is that nanotubes don't grow into toroids. They can form spirals that look like toroids under any but the most powerfull microscopes, but these spirals will unravel very quickly. That point is a weak rebuttal, because we could probably close those rings with an electron or ion beam if we really wanted to.
Also, keep in mind that there are very, very few molecules which are "stiff" all by themselves. Carbon nanotubes are definitely not one of them. It would be like making chainmail out of very strong cooked noodles. Really what you want is more than the 4 links provided by chainmail. By tangling these up, we can link up to many times more other nanotubes than by controllable copying of a two dimensional nearest-neighbor lattice. For example, if we have a three dimensional cubic lattice of interlocking rings, we have 6 links in a nearest neighbor (chainmail) case, and 14 in a nearest and next-nearest neighbor case, increasing redundancy and bonding energy. We could keep going by weaving these things together. In a really tight weave (or a huge tangle like what these nanotube fibers really are), you may have one fiber connected to hundreds of others.
Except for one more issue, all the weaving done right now might still theoretically be made stronger by closing the ends of the nantubes to avoid unravelling (so your general idea is good). If stress is put on a bend in a nanotube, it will lead to a "5-7" defect where two hexagonal rings become one ring of 5, and one of 7, inducing a 15 degree permanant bend in the tube. These defects lead to nanotubes which have at best 50% the tensile strength of a non-defective tube, but often more like 15%. That's why so much work is being put into aligned nanotube fibers. These fibers have been measured to be stronger than any other known material. If these aligned fibers are then woven, they are lighter and stronger than Kevlar. Coincidentally, the molecularly woven (tangled) nanotube fibers made by these guys at MIT are not much stronger than generic clothing fiber. The key is to weave the fibers macroscopically and allow the nanotubes to bend less than 15 degrees on a molecular scale.
Hope this was helpful.
The nanotube thread we can make now is not strong enough to work. What we need is a way to "weld" nanotubes together without introducing massive defects (that's key). There's a significant amount of physics to be done there.
On the other hand, we've been able to increase the size of the nanotubes we've been able to grow an order of magnitude every few years. We're up to centimeters now for one, single tube, and the process is likely scalable (as in, bigger furnace, longer tubes).
To get an idea of how hard this would be:
62000 miles is about 1*10^14 micrometers,
There are about 3.2*10^7 seconds in a year,
nanotubes grow at around 300 micrometers a second,
so it would take 10,000 years to grow that elevator out of continuous tubes (unless we're way, way off on the speed).
I'm not sure about 15 years, but I think we'll get it done sometime in the next 100 with some sort of welding technique, and in the long run, it's going to cost a lot more than anyone now thinks.
Decaf coffee is (or at least can be) produced from "real" coffee by soaking it in supercritical carbon dioxide. Last I checked, that was relatively cheap, effective, environmentally friendly and has nothing to do with genetic engineering.
This metaphor is seriously flawed. In a working biological system DNA can't be hidden, obscured, enciphered or otherwise made unreadable. The DNA which was modified is right there for everyone to see. In software, it is extraordinarily difficult to take a working program and reverse engineer the source. Even if a company owns some genetic code, it's still accessible to any genetic researcher.
Within the next 15 years, it will become trivial to quickly determine the base pair code of any strand of DNA, and comparisons between related species will be fast and easy. This idea that a defect with "wheat 2.0" is the same as Windows bugs is silly. Academic researchers can and will test patented DNA and improve it.
Yeah, I had always assumed the world was going to end on a tuesday.
As a physicist, I feel the same way about science fiction. It got me interested enough in science to consider it a career, but looking at it now, I'm shocked by how wrong it is.
I've got a friend who is a lawyer now, and the drudgery of taking depositions and filling out forms is nothing like the mock-trial compititions which convinced him to go to law school.
Perhaps if we had a psychologist or someone similar here, they could explain to us why it is all the "fun" stuff that gets us hooked on a subject turns out to be so wrong.
You might want to use a few different examples than lead and mercury, because those ARE regular chemicals, elements even. We've had health problems with those for hundreds of years. While that is a problem we'll have associated with nanotechnology, it's not something NEW to worry about, as it's a general electronics manufacturing problem.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, just saying that you've got two problems here. One is the industrial-age old problem of metal pollutants, the other is the brand new problem of unknown nanoscale materials.
There are many many new materials discovered every week which have unknown health and environmental effects. Where do nanotubes go when they're not used in a device, and how long do they stay there? We don't know. We need to be active in researching these things and advertising the results.
Really though, get some better examples because it sounds a little silly to call solder a nanomaterial.