You make a good point. There are no places in space. I would be shocked if there were. I really don't know how exciting or boring it is up there.
Those places in Florida weren't always there. Someone spent a lot of time and money building them. Why can't the same be true in orbit? (The answer obviously is the cost.) So maybe it's not ready yet. Hernando de Soto and Ponce de Leon weren't asked to build a themepark.
There will be some people who will pay just to say they've been in space. Maybe if it's actually boring up there, not enough people will pay, but I bet those few people who don't puke the whole time will find it a lot of fun.
Why do people go to Florida in the summer? It's hot, humid and full of bugs. Yet, people from around the world go to Disney just because they've never been there. I think the X-prize winners will find enough people to make a buck.
The method of using spyware to generate pop-up ads is dishonest and should be illegal. Content is irrelevant.
There are plenty of scarier examples of First Amendment encroachment out there (one that quickly comes to mind, Howard Stern). Save your wrath for those.
I mean really, you're going to use spyware to alert me to the wrongdoings of LL Bean should I happen upon their website? I would be so pissed about the spyware, I would probably buy more stuff (an emotional reaction, I'm sure I would return it later). You're obviously a person with moral standards, would you really want to deceive people just to alert them to deception?
Some people here have mentioned nanotechnology simulations, I don't know that the label needs to be thrown around so much but I have written a few models of the type which will be used. I make, every once in a while, a computer model to explain my experimental results (usually for myself, when I don't believe something).
Generally, these are voltage and force relaxations, with some areas of well defined voltage, some point charges thrown around, and very complex geometry. Basically, that means I set up a system which would be very difficult to solve analytically, describe Laplace's equation on a grid, and iterate until it's satisfied everywhere on my grid. It takes a long time, and is probably hugely inefficient, but it will give me all the fringing fields and strange interactios I need.
I'm not a computational physicist, so none of my stuff will end up there, but that's the kind of thing that will be running. Laplace's equation describes a huge number of phenomena, and is easy to describe computationally in a grid. What would be cool to know is how many X by Y by Z grid iterations can be done a second. Is it 50 trillion/(XYZ)? My God, that would be awsome! Unfortunately, I don't know the right answer.
You're missing some physics, allow me to fill you in:
Particle detectors of these kinds detect all weakly interacting particles. Weakly interacting means that it will generally go strait through matter without "touching" it at all. Thermal equilibrium (temperature) is a non-issue in that weakly interacting particles don't contact enough with "normal" matter to ever come to thermal equilibrium. They cool it down so that stray vibrations don't give a false positive reading. A good example of a weakly interacting particle is a neutrino. You probably know that most neutrinos go strait through the earth, other stars, and a whole lot of the universe without even knowing that anything else exits. These guys probably pick up all sorts of neutrinos, and they use that measurement to calibrate their instrument. Neutrinos have a very low mass, and their energy spectrum on earth is pretty well mapped out now. If these guys get anything out of the ordinary, they'll jump on it and call that a WIMP.
So we get to the statistical part. Now, on/., it's very popular to put down statistics, but in real life, scientests use statistics for nearly everything. My theory is that most people hate statistical mechanics, so they don't realize the power and accuracy which it has, and don't trust it in general. Marketers and politicians, on the other hand, know little to nothing about statistical mechanics and abuse the math of statistics for personal gain. This further poisons people's minds against the elegance of statistics.
These guys aren't playing statistical games. They're calculating the probability that they get no measurement of WIMPS with the parameter being how easily they interact with the normal matter that makes up their instrument. They then use that to put an upper bound on how often they interact with matter. That bound is defined by the probabilities in their calculations (which you can probably trust since just about every theoretical particle physicist in the world has checked them). The exact level, be it 90%, 99%, 99.999999% or whatever is something the guys in the field have decided on, and it's in some paper somewhere.
The end result that these guys are looking for is how much dark matter interacts with the rest of the universe. Being able to say, "It interacts less than X with 99% accuracy" is pretty nice. At some point that "X" is going to get so low, the theorists will throw the idea out and move on. Unless, of course, the holy grail is found and someone detects dark matter interactions.
I hope that helps.
Where you are directly on target is to critisize these guys for doing all this research and gathering all this money for something that is so far unmeasurable and theoretically not much more than the "aether" of 150 years ago (I've met theorists who will admit to as much). The bottom line is that it hasn't been disproven yet either (people are trying to do that too). As long as that's the case, people probably should still be out there looking for this stuff.
You know, I've had this discussion many times here, and each time I come across someone stubborn such as yourself. Inevitably, I end up learning more about myself than anything else.
In trying to explain my views to you in yet another message, I realized that my main point is that there are no experimentalists working on this, and every experimentalist I know thinks it's nutty. The result is none of us even try. So rather that complain that people are missing the big picture for this talk about molecular machining, maybe we should try to do something more constructive. I'm not saying I can do it, but perhaps I could convince someone who can do it to try. That's what science is about right? You're right about most of your points, the general questions are important, whether they're asked in the right context or not.
I still think it's going to be hard, slow and expensive. Allthough it kills me to say it, thanks. If you still think I'm a prideful jerk, well, maybe I am.
You may be right, I could be blinded by proximity. On the other hand, I could have acutal experiance in the field. One thing is for certain, most people outside of the field have no idea what nanotechnology really means. Why is it reasonable to expect a fabricator in 20 years? Who is working on it experimentally? Are diamondoid building blocks really going to work? Why is everyone using metal and organics then?
I beleive your first two points are wrong. People disagree in science. You're right about the rest however. You bring up a very good point, that the problems still exist, regardless of what I say. I would extend that to the problems exist, regardless of what you say as well.
The problems of better, cheaper weapons, smaller computers and arms races will easily come about from what is being done now. So what is it we should be worried about? A nanotech fabricator, or the problems it's supposed to bring with it? Those problems are coming with or without the fabricator. The difference is, we're talking about traditional chemistry, physics and engineering, not some magical, cheap, fast and easy device.
It makes no sense to argue about what should be done about an undiscovered piece of equipment when the problems we're supposed to be avoiding are taking shape right now.
As long as fantasy such as this is thrown around, the public will not see the revolution going on in science. You are arguing over Neil Stephenson's book, NOT the real world, and I'm sorry if you feel I'm stuck up for being worried about reality. I think you've got your head in the sand.
I work in nanotechnology, and while it might be possible that in 20 years the world will have gone to hell, I highly dount it will be because of this work that no one is doing. The actual work being done in nanotech, is another matter.
These guys make molecular manufacturing sound easy. I'd like to see them try it! None of this is easy, and I would say most of us think molecular manufacturing isn't even possible. The set up described in Drexler's book is not attainable. There are no big names in nanotechnology working on molecular manufacturing, but plenty working on lots of other things.
There is more than enough to be worried about with what is ACTUALLY being done with nanotechnology. It's insulting to those of us in the field, that our research on gas detectors, bio-electronics, nerve regerneration, nanometer transistors, pathogen detectors and drug delivery is deemed so umimportant that it's not even worth talking about. Moreover, there are tremendous issues involved in those projects, which no one is talking about. Any warning about ACTUAL dangers in nanotechnology is being drowned out by ignorant shrills simply seeking the spotlight.
We need a debate on what sensitive explosives sensors are going to do not only for security, but for farmers, scientests and anyone who works around incriminating chemicals. I don't want to be taken in for questioning every time I board a plane. We need to talk about what happens with illegal drugs and steroids when drugs can be delivered to a specific organ and leave the rest of the body largely unaffected. We need to talk about what it really means for education and health when computers are small enough to fit inside the body. The reason I read slashdot is because every once in a while these things come up here. There are plenty of large moral issues literally around the corner, but almost no one is paying attention! Live in the present, it is a fascinating time, and we have many, many unanswered questions.
Debating how to prevent a fictional future arms race depending on a scientific advance many scientests doing the work don't believe will happen in our lifetimes is plain stupid in comparison.
To be fair, I think molecular manufacturing WILL be seen in our lifetime, but it will not be cheap, nor easy, nor fast. Go ahead and calculate how long it will take to make one kilogram of something at 1000000 atoms a second, it's around 1 trillion years. Plain old wet chemistry (aka "bottom up nanotechnology") still has a lot of time and use left. For the first 10 or 20 years molecular manufacturing is around no one will know what to do with it because it will not be this holy grail the media has worked it into. This is based on the history of science, from the steam engine to microscopes capable of atomic resolution. We've always set our sights on these goals, only to be surprised at their implimentation. It's always taken the big breakthroughs a decade or two to get used.
If you read a bit closer I think you'll see she's not talking about personality problems. On a basic level, robots already suffer from neglect and public fear of them. There are people who are jealous of robots, and that's only going to increase in the future. There will be misunderstanding, hatred, and love toward robots, but not necessarily from robots unless they are programmed that way.
I thought the answer to the question of the three laws and military or security robots was very interesting in this regard. It hints at issues such as: when a robot's programming is complex enough for it to make a decision when to kill someone, who is at fault when it makes the wrong decision?
It seems more necessary to educate the populace that robots are NOT emotional things, that they are designed to be efficient. The overall theme she was trying to get across is that it is we humans who need help with our personality problems towards robots, not the other way around.
High Tc superconductivity actaully has the begginings of a good theory to explain it.
In BCS theory, electrons interact with phonons (lattice vibrations) to coordinate into pairs and form bosons.
In much the same way, electrons in high Tc superconductors interact with spin waves in an antiferromagnetic material to coordinate into pairs and form bosons.
An antiferromagnetic material is one where the magnetic moments of neighboring atoms are opposite
up down up down up down up down up
You could imagine trying to move the middle electron over one position (trade with the electron to its right):
up down up down down up up down up
Now our magnetic order is screwed up, and this defect can propogate:
up down down up down up down up up
Each pair of "up up" or "down down" next to eachother is a spin wave, which is a boson, with a spin of 1.
Of course, really proving this theoretically is much harder, I don't think it's been done in 3D.
That's the same sort of thing people were saying 60 years ago.
When physicists started doing fusion research, the plasma chambers were about 3 feet on a side, and very easy to use (comparitively speaking). Most people didn't believe it would ever amount to anything, but everyone was in awe of the compactness, elegance and exotic behavior of the experiment.
The scientests working on it probably said exactly the same thing these guys are saying: we see some energy out, we're not quite at break even, but we'll get there.
After working with fusion guys for a couple of years, I know that this stuff gets complicated really fast. This bubble fusion technique is at the point laser fusion was at 15 years ago, which means it's about time everyone started taking it seriously. In a few years we'll be debating where to put the new, mega-huge bubble fusion test reactor, which will bring us, again, one step closer.
Sometime in the next 50 years, one of these methods will turn the corner. The magnetic field people will figure out what to make thier vessel walls out of, the laser people will figure out how to make and shoot perfect hollow spheres of frozen DT, or these guys will overcome whatever unknown problem is keeping them from producing energy.
As one who is familiar with the California state government committee process, I can say that this is not unusual.
It's not that the legislators are out on the golf course, but rather that on a "committee day," every committee meets. Not only are legislators members of more than one committee (which might meet concurrantly), but they also have to present the bills they are sponsoring to the other committees. In addition, there are the lobbyists, constituents, and other legislators all trying to meet with them to try and convince them in private to vote a certain way.
In short, it is utter chaos, and a miricle that anything gets done at all.
In order to build your biosensor, you need to have a good knowledge of physics, some engineering and some biochemistry. It's a great example of what can be done when people creatively put together existing technologies. What special quality is that though? Can't people in undeveloped countries learn a little science and come up with a good idea?
What is an undeveloped country? India? One of the most successful methods of chemical analyzaition is Raman spectroscopy, developed by and Indian, in India, 50 years ago. This was not a small effect, but something which is fundamental to understanding chemistry and materials science. Similarly, there are labs in China which can compete with anything Europeans or people in the US are doing.
People there are not just sitting around waiting for that unskilled job. The developed countries do NOT have a monopoly on innovation or brainpower, there are smart people in every culture, and every country of the world.
Forget computers for a moment and just look at how many experts in physics, chemistry and molecular biology are coming out of places like India and China. It's not a small number!
I don't think anyone needs to worry about this, but we should all be aware of it. Our expectations for the future should not be that Europe, Japan and the United States will continue to dominate every field of science. These large, undeveloped countries will find it much easier to just skip the 20th century and build directly into the 21st. Expect a repeat of what Japan did 100 years ago.
I agree that the US is a big country and that we'll be fine in the long run, and I also agree that the way Sweden has done things is the right way, but I don't think that it will be very hard for other people to do the same thing.
In my lab, our "rapid thermal annealler" is basically an EZ bake oven. We use a high voltage source and a special halogen bulb mounted in a vacuum chamber to bring the surface of just about whatever we want to 1200 C from room temperature in 50 seconds.
Ha ha that was really funny, until I realized that since I've been engaged I rarely leave the house for any reason other than work, family obligations (includes things I do "for" my fiance) and food shopping.
My entire life is now ruled by work and a girl with an unending supply of ballet tickets!
This has been an ongoing trend in the US for a long time now. For about 30 years, US citizens have been more and more reluctant to give the "hard" sciences a try.
Take a look at this to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
A special quote from table 2 is: "Except for biological and social sciences, the number of science and engineering Ph.D. graduates was lower in 2002 than it was in 1992". Obviously we're doing something right as scientests in general if everyone else seems to think we don't need any help!
I say, this trend of decreasing enrollment signifies the re-acceptance of computer science as an actual science by the general public. I think most of the problems with not-so-motivated peers which have been voiced here come from the perception of computer science during the 90s as something other than "real" science.
I appreciate the correction, and I don't think you're being mean, so don't worry about it.
The model organisms, expression vectors and cell cultures do not come strait out of nature into our labs. They were modified, or created by other scientests. Is finding a way to generate pure anthrax toxin weapons research or usefull biology?
We're both saying that it is usefull biology. I don't WANT to work with live bugs. I want someone to give me the protein so I can try and detect it, but in order to do that we need someone to do something that looks a lot like weapons research to the rest of the world.
So, if I want to make a vaccine, counter-virus, or sensor for Anthrax, how do you suggest I do it if I don't have access to any Anthrax virus?
I'm being honest here. I'm a scientest. I work on biosensors. Politics aside, you want me to not have access to Anthrax, SARS, or any other virus, fine. Tell me how I am supposed to help people when I can't study the problem.
If someone makes a virus, how can I tell unless I can see what a man-made virus looks like compared to a natural one?
This is why the government still has strains of these viruses running around, and why they continue to cultivate them.
I suppose we could ignore this whole thing, but then don't come complaining to me when you get sick and there's no cure.
It can only be used on viruses which have a well known surface behavior, which we have a known antibody for and whose antibody can be attached easily to a SAM (protein monolayer).
On the other hand, this technique requires rinsing away all the viruses which are NOT attached to the antibody. It is very easy (and is done all the time) to just deposit a collection of viruses, or whatever you want, on a piece of silicon and take an AFM of it. Viruses tend to all look similar though.
They're trying to be ultra-specific, for commercial reasons. If you want to do research with this, it's being done now, and has been done for the last 10 years.
It's not that hard to cut nanotubes. I imagine a knife or sharp rock would do nicely on this stuff, seeing as nanotubes grown from ethanol are usually full of defects (yay oxygen).
Remember, they have high tensile strength, not a high shear strength. We cut nanotubes all the time in our lab, using a silicon atomic force microscope tip (think tiny, tiny silicon record player).
On the other hand, it would be a pain to be tied up in nanotubes. They might stretch a little, but good luck breaking it.
OK, you caught me with your first point in using an absolute, but the people at the front of the room better be more knowledgeable than the average member of the audience, or there is going to be a long and painful question and answer session.
As for the rest, I wasn't making a moral judgement about execs, simply stating that I believe the interest in this dialogue is simply to stay competitive, and not because they have any special insight. In my experiance, as soon as a company builds a name for itself in a field, it starts telling that field what it should want. I've got all sorts of cutting edge, worthless junk lying around the lab which vendors have insisted I needed desperately.
On the other hand, now that you have me thinking about communities, I must admit that I exist in a rather strange place. Perhaps the problem is that there are very few companies geared up to sell to my field (nanotech), but a lot of compainies want to get an early position in it. In addition, no one is really sure what the hell we're supposed to be working toward. The result is that no one really knows what anyone else wants, and a lot of left overs from other areas get passed around.
If the person at the front of the room is not the most knowlegable person in the room on the subject, the conferece organizers have not done their jobs.
The people in the booth, and in the marketing department are no longer the people who KNOW anything about the subject. You need to realize that if your customer knows more about your field than your salesman, you will not make a sale.
The execs are trying to save their own asses with this "opening communication channels" stuff, missing the point that it was the business people who closed the channel in the first place.
The situation you describe about a customer knowing what they want, and the business people telling them they want something else, is a recent development in high tech.
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You make a good point. There are no places in space. I would be shocked if there were. I really don't know how exciting or boring it is up there.
Those places in Florida weren't always there. Someone spent a lot of time and money building them. Why can't the same be true in orbit? (The answer obviously is the cost.) So maybe it's not ready yet. Hernando de Soto and Ponce de Leon weren't asked to build a themepark.
There will be some people who will pay just to say they've been in space. Maybe if it's actually boring up there, not enough people will pay, but I bet those few people who don't puke the whole time will find it a lot of fun.
Maybe YOU don't have relatives on Mars...
Why do people go to Florida in the summer? It's hot, humid and full of bugs. Yet, people from around the world go to Disney just because they've never been there. I think the X-prize winners will find enough people to make a buck.
I think most of us can agree:
The method of using spyware to generate pop-up ads is dishonest and should be illegal. Content is irrelevant.
There are plenty of scarier examples of First Amendment encroachment out there (one that quickly comes to mind, Howard Stern). Save your wrath for those.
I mean really, you're going to use spyware to alert me to the wrongdoings of LL Bean should I happen upon their website? I would be so pissed about the spyware, I would probably buy more stuff (an emotional reaction, I'm sure I would return it later). You're obviously a person with moral standards, would you really want to deceive people just to alert them to deception?
Some people here have mentioned nanotechnology simulations, I don't know that the label needs to be thrown around so much but I have written a few models of the type which will be used. I make, every once in a while, a computer model to explain my experimental results (usually for myself, when I don't believe something).
Generally, these are voltage and force relaxations, with some areas of well defined voltage, some point charges thrown around, and very complex geometry. Basically, that means I set up a system which would be very difficult to solve analytically, describe Laplace's equation on a grid, and iterate until it's satisfied everywhere on my grid. It takes a long time, and is probably hugely inefficient, but it will give me all the fringing fields and strange interactios I need.
I'm not a computational physicist, so none of my stuff will end up there, but that's the kind of thing that will be running. Laplace's equation describes a huge number of phenomena, and is easy to describe computationally in a grid. What would be cool to know is how many X by Y by Z grid iterations can be done a second. Is it 50 trillion/(XYZ)? My God, that would be awsome! Unfortunately, I don't know the right answer.
You're missing some physics, allow me to fill you in:
/., it's very popular to put down statistics, but in real life, scientests use statistics for nearly everything. My theory is that most people hate statistical mechanics, so they don't realize the power and accuracy which it has, and don't trust it in general. Marketers and politicians, on the other hand, know little to nothing about statistical mechanics and abuse the math of statistics for personal gain. This further poisons people's minds against the elegance of statistics.
Particle detectors of these kinds detect all weakly interacting particles. Weakly interacting means that it will generally go strait through matter without "touching" it at all. Thermal equilibrium (temperature) is a non-issue in that weakly interacting particles don't contact enough with "normal" matter to ever come to thermal equilibrium. They cool it down so that stray vibrations don't give a false positive reading. A good example of a weakly interacting particle is a neutrino. You probably know that most neutrinos go strait through the earth, other stars, and a whole lot of the universe without even knowing that anything else exits. These guys probably pick up all sorts of neutrinos, and they use that measurement to calibrate their instrument. Neutrinos have a very low mass, and their energy spectrum on earth is pretty well mapped out now. If these guys get anything out of the ordinary, they'll jump on it and call that a WIMP.
So we get to the statistical part. Now, on
These guys aren't playing statistical games. They're calculating the probability that they get no measurement of WIMPS with the parameter being how easily they interact with the normal matter that makes up their instrument. They then use that to put an upper bound on how often they interact with matter. That bound is defined by the probabilities in their calculations (which you can probably trust since just about every theoretical particle physicist in the world has checked them). The exact level, be it 90%, 99%, 99.999999% or whatever is something the guys in the field have decided on, and it's in some paper somewhere.
The end result that these guys are looking for is how much dark matter interacts with the rest of the universe. Being able to say, "It interacts less than X with 99% accuracy" is pretty nice. At some point that "X" is going to get so low, the theorists will throw the idea out and move on. Unless, of course, the holy grail is found and someone detects dark matter interactions.
I hope that helps.
Where you are directly on target is to critisize these guys for doing all this research and gathering all this money for something that is so far unmeasurable and theoretically not much more than the "aether" of 150 years ago (I've met theorists who will admit to as much). The bottom line is that it hasn't been disproven yet either (people are trying to do that too). As long as that's the case, people probably should still be out there looking for this stuff.
You know, I've had this discussion many times here, and each time I come across someone stubborn such as yourself. Inevitably, I end up learning more about myself than anything else.
In trying to explain my views to you in yet another message, I realized that my main point is that there are no experimentalists working on this, and every experimentalist I know thinks it's nutty. The result is none of us even try. So rather that complain that people are missing the big picture for this talk about molecular machining, maybe we should try to do something more constructive. I'm not saying I can do it, but perhaps I could convince someone who can do it to try. That's what science is about right? You're right about most of your points, the general questions are important, whether they're asked in the right context or not.
I still think it's going to be hard, slow and expensive. Allthough it kills me to say it, thanks. If you still think I'm a prideful jerk, well, maybe I am.
You may be right, I could be blinded by proximity. On the other hand, I could have acutal experiance in the field. One thing is for certain, most people outside of the field have no idea what nanotechnology really means. Why is it reasonable to expect a fabricator in 20 years? Who is working on it experimentally? Are diamondoid building blocks really going to work? Why is everyone using metal and organics then?
I beleive your first two points are wrong. People disagree in science. You're right about the rest however. You bring up a very good point, that the problems still exist, regardless of what I say. I would extend that to the problems exist, regardless of what you say as well.
The problems of better, cheaper weapons, smaller computers and arms races will easily come about from what is being done now. So what is it we should be worried about? A nanotech fabricator, or the problems it's supposed to bring with it? Those problems are coming with or without the fabricator. The difference is, we're talking about traditional chemistry, physics and engineering, not some magical, cheap, fast and easy device.
It makes no sense to argue about what should be done about an undiscovered piece of equipment when the problems we're supposed to be avoiding are taking shape right now.
As long as fantasy such as this is thrown around, the public will not see the revolution going on in science. You are arguing over Neil Stephenson's book, NOT the real world, and I'm sorry if you feel I'm stuck up for being worried about reality. I think you've got your head in the sand.
I work in nanotechnology, and while it might be possible that in 20 years the world will have gone to hell, I highly dount it will be because of this work that no one is doing. The actual work being done in nanotech, is another matter.
These guys make molecular manufacturing sound easy. I'd like to see them try it! None of this is easy, and I would say most of us think molecular manufacturing isn't even possible. The set up described in Drexler's book is not attainable. There are no big names in nanotechnology working on molecular manufacturing, but plenty working on lots of other things.
There is more than enough to be worried about with what is ACTUALLY being done with nanotechnology. It's insulting to those of us in the field, that our research on gas detectors, bio-electronics, nerve regerneration, nanometer transistors, pathogen detectors and drug delivery is deemed so umimportant that it's not even worth talking about. Moreover, there are tremendous issues involved in those projects, which no one is talking about. Any warning about ACTUAL dangers in nanotechnology is being drowned out by ignorant shrills simply seeking the spotlight.
We need a debate on what sensitive explosives sensors are going to do not only for security, but for farmers, scientests and anyone who works around incriminating chemicals. I don't want to be taken in for questioning every time I board a plane. We need to talk about what happens with illegal drugs and steroids when drugs can be delivered to a specific organ and leave the rest of the body largely unaffected. We need to talk about what it really means for education and health when computers are small enough to fit inside the body. The reason I read slashdot is because every once in a while these things come up here. There are plenty of large moral issues literally around the corner, but almost no one is paying attention! Live in the present, it is a fascinating time, and we have many, many unanswered questions.
Debating how to prevent a fictional future arms race depending on a scientific advance many scientests doing the work don't believe will happen in our lifetimes is plain stupid in comparison.
To be fair, I think molecular manufacturing WILL be seen in our lifetime, but it will not be cheap, nor easy, nor fast. Go ahead and calculate how long it will take to make one kilogram of something at 1000000 atoms a second, it's around 1 trillion years. Plain old wet chemistry (aka "bottom up nanotechnology") still has a lot of time and use left. For the first 10 or 20 years molecular manufacturing is around no one will know what to do with it because it will not be this holy grail the media has worked it into. This is based on the history of science, from the steam engine to microscopes capable of atomic resolution. We've always set our sights on these goals, only to be surprised at their implimentation. It's always taken the big breakthroughs a decade or two to get used.
If you read a bit closer I think you'll see she's not talking about personality problems. On a basic level, robots already suffer from neglect and public fear of them. There are people who are jealous of robots, and that's only going to increase in the future. There will be misunderstanding, hatred, and love toward robots, but not necessarily from robots unless they are programmed that way.
I thought the answer to the question of the three laws and military or security robots was very interesting in this regard. It hints at issues such as: when a robot's programming is complex enough for it to make a decision when to kill someone, who is at fault when it makes the wrong decision?
It seems more necessary to educate the populace that robots are NOT emotional things, that they are designed to be efficient. The overall theme she was trying to get across is that it is we humans who need help with our personality problems towards robots, not the other way around.
High Tc superconductivity actaully has the begginings of a good theory to explain it.
In BCS theory, electrons interact with phonons (lattice vibrations) to coordinate into pairs and form bosons.
In much the same way, electrons in high Tc superconductors interact with spin waves in an antiferromagnetic material to coordinate into pairs and form bosons.
An antiferromagnetic material is one where the magnetic moments of neighboring atoms are opposite
up down up down up down up down up
You could imagine trying to move the middle electron over one position (trade with the electron to its right):
up down up down down up up down up
Now our magnetic order is screwed up, and this defect can propogate:
up down down up down up down up up
Each pair of "up up" or "down down" next to eachother is a spin wave, which is a boson, with a spin of 1.
Of course, really proving this theoretically is much harder, I don't think it's been done in 3D.
That's the same sort of thing people were saying 60 years ago.
When physicists started doing fusion research, the plasma chambers were about 3 feet on a side, and very easy to use (comparitively speaking). Most people didn't believe it would ever amount to anything, but everyone was in awe of the compactness, elegance and exotic behavior of the experiment.
The scientests working on it probably said exactly the same thing these guys are saying: we see some energy out, we're not quite at break even, but we'll get there.
After working with fusion guys for a couple of years, I know that this stuff gets complicated really fast. This bubble fusion technique is at the point laser fusion was at 15 years ago, which means it's about time everyone started taking it seriously. In a few years we'll be debating where to put the new, mega-huge bubble fusion test reactor, which will bring us, again, one step closer.
Sometime in the next 50 years, one of these methods will turn the corner. The magnetic field people will figure out what to make thier vessel walls out of, the laser people will figure out how to make and shoot perfect hollow spheres of frozen DT, or these guys will overcome whatever unknown problem is keeping them from producing energy.
As one who is familiar with the California state government committee process, I can say that this is not unusual.
It's not that the legislators are out on the golf course, but rather that on a "committee day," every committee meets. Not only are legislators members of more than one committee (which might meet concurrantly), but they also have to present the bills they are sponsoring to the other committees. In addition, there are the lobbyists, constituents, and other legislators all trying to meet with them to try and convince them in private to vote a certain way.
In short, it is utter chaos, and a miricle that anything gets done at all.
In order to build your biosensor, you need to have a good knowledge of physics, some engineering and some biochemistry. It's a great example of what can be done when people creatively put together existing technologies. What special quality is that though? Can't people in undeveloped countries learn a little science and come up with a good idea?
What is an undeveloped country? India? One of the most successful methods of chemical analyzaition is Raman spectroscopy, developed by and Indian, in India, 50 years ago. This was not a small effect, but something which is fundamental to understanding chemistry and materials science. Similarly, there are labs in China which can compete with anything Europeans or people in the US are doing.
People there are not just sitting around waiting for that unskilled job. The developed countries do NOT have a monopoly on innovation or brainpower, there are smart people in every culture, and every country of the world.
Forget computers for a moment and just look at how many experts in physics, chemistry and molecular biology are coming out of places like India and China. It's not a small number!
I don't think anyone needs to worry about this, but we should all be aware of it. Our expectations for the future should not be that Europe, Japan and the United States will continue to dominate every field of science. These large, undeveloped countries will find it much easier to just skip the 20th century and build directly into the 21st. Expect a repeat of what Japan did 100 years ago.
I agree that the US is a big country and that we'll be fine in the long run, and I also agree that the way Sweden has done things is the right way, but I don't think that it will be very hard for other people to do the same thing.
You may laugh, but I kid you not:
In my lab, our "rapid thermal annealler" is basically an EZ bake oven. We use a high voltage source and a special halogen bulb mounted in a vacuum chamber to bring the surface of just about whatever we want to 1200 C from room temperature in 50 seconds.
We call it the EZ bake oven from hell.
Ha ha that was really funny, until I realized that since I've been engaged I rarely leave the house for any reason other than work, family obligations (includes things I do "for" my fiance) and food shopping.
My entire life is now ruled by work and a girl with an unending supply of ballet tickets!
Wow, we say the same thing about Mexico here in California!
Wow, and here I was thinking the game was a little soft to really be grounded in reality!
This has been an ongoing trend in the US for a long time now. For about 30 years, US citizens have been more and more reluctant to give the "hard" sciences a try.
Take a look at
this to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
A special quote from table 2 is: "Except for biological and social sciences, the number of science and engineering Ph.D. graduates was lower in 2002 than it was in 1992". Obviously we're doing something right as scientests in general if everyone else seems to think we don't need any help!
I say, this trend of decreasing enrollment signifies the re-acceptance of computer science as an actual science by the general public. I think most of the problems with not-so-motivated peers which have been voiced here come from the perception of computer science during the 90s as something other than "real" science.
I work on using carbon nanotubes to electronically detect conformational changes in proteins.
I'm a condensed matter physicist, who sadly lacks the encyclopedic knowledge of my biology collegues.
I appreciate the correction, and I don't think you're being mean, so don't worry about it.
The model organisms, expression vectors and cell cultures do not come strait out of nature into our labs. They were modified, or created by other scientests. Is finding a way to generate pure anthrax toxin weapons research or usefull biology?
We're both saying that it is usefull biology. I don't WANT to work with live bugs. I want someone to give me the protein so I can try and detect it, but in order to do that we need someone to do something that looks a lot like weapons research to the rest of the world.
So, if I want to make a vaccine, counter-virus, or sensor for Anthrax, how do you suggest I do it if I don't have access to any Anthrax virus?
I'm being honest here. I'm a scientest. I work on biosensors. Politics aside, you want me to not have access to Anthrax, SARS, or any other virus, fine. Tell me how I am supposed to help people when I can't study the problem.
If someone makes a virus, how can I tell unless I can see what a man-made virus looks like compared to a natural one?
This is why the government still has strains of these viruses running around, and why they continue to cultivate them.
I suppose we could ignore this whole thing, but then don't come complaining to me when you get sick and there's no cure.
This technique is actually worse than you think.
It can only be used on viruses which have a well known surface behavior, which we have a known antibody for and whose antibody can be attached easily to a SAM (protein monolayer).
On the other hand, this technique requires rinsing away all the viruses which are NOT attached to the antibody. It is very easy (and is done all the time) to just deposit a collection of viruses, or whatever you want, on a piece of silicon and take an AFM of it. Viruses tend to all look similar though.
They're trying to be ultra-specific, for commercial reasons. If you want to do research with this, it's being done now, and has been done for the last 10 years.
It's not that hard to cut nanotubes. I imagine a knife or sharp rock would do nicely on this stuff, seeing as nanotubes grown from ethanol are usually full of defects (yay oxygen).
Remember, they have high tensile strength, not a high shear strength. We cut nanotubes all the time in our lab, using a silicon atomic force microscope tip (think tiny, tiny silicon record player).
On the other hand, it would be a pain to be tied up in nanotubes. They might stretch a little, but good luck breaking it.
OK, you caught me with your first point in using an absolute, but the people at the front of the room better be more knowledgeable than the average member of the audience, or there is going to be a long and painful question and answer session.
As for the rest, I wasn't making a moral judgement about execs, simply stating that I believe the interest in this dialogue is simply to stay competitive, and not because they have any special insight. In my experiance, as soon as a company builds a name for itself in a field, it starts telling that field what it should want. I've got all sorts of cutting edge, worthless junk lying around the lab which vendors have insisted I needed desperately.
On the other hand, now that you have me thinking about communities, I must admit that I exist in a rather strange place. Perhaps the problem is that there are very few companies geared up to sell to my field (nanotech), but a lot of compainies want to get an early position in it. In addition, no one is really sure what the hell we're supposed to be working toward. The result is that no one really knows what anyone else wants, and a lot of left overs from other areas get passed around.
If the person at the front of the room is not the most knowlegable person in the room on the subject, the conferece organizers have not done their jobs.
The people in the booth, and in the marketing department are no longer the people who KNOW anything about the subject. You need to realize that if your customer knows more about your field than your salesman, you will not make a sale.
The execs are trying to save their own asses with this "opening communication channels" stuff, missing the point that it was the business people who closed the channel in the first place.
The situation you describe about a customer knowing what they want, and the business people telling them they want something else, is a recent development in high tech.