1) The problem with nanotech is the assumption that familiar macroscopic concepts (gears, pulleys, "assemblers", what have you) can be easily translated to nanoscopic dimensions. In general, they can't because the physical and chemical properties at that scale are different. Stiction is just one specific example of that.
2) Everything is exactly like what it is. Some things are somewhat like things they aren't. For the physical world, the degree of "somewhat" is pretty much independent of convenient or attractive metaphors (unless you believe in deconstructionism). But when you're trying to communicate nonobvious concepts to nonspecialists, you're doomed to using everyday language, which can easily be imprecise, vague, or misleading. Some scientists (Sagan comes to mind) seem to be better at this than others, but they also tend to spend more time at it.
I think it's highly unlikely that Whitesides assumes everything is like chemistry or biology. What he's trying to do is demonstrate that a) we already have nanotechnology (biology) that works so well that we have yet to improve upon it in some of its most mundane aspects, yet we're nowhere near to understanding it, and b) nanotechnology in the sense of nanoscopic analogs of macrosopic mechanical devices is likely to be quite a bit more challenging than common technical sense might suggest.
3) Enzyme structure is 3D, but that 3D structure is determined by its linear sequence of amino acids. How that 3D structure is achieved continues to be a mystery. It's not random thermal motion causing the strand to move through all physically possible conformations until the proper one is found; it's been shown that to do so for any reasonably sized protien would require time on the order of the lifetime of the universe. In some cases, other (3D) protiens appear to assist in the folding of protiens (in 3D space) but of course those helper protiens had to start somewhere... the old chicken & egg problem. Now, how does this relate to a serious problem for nanotech? Well, the point he left out is how incredibly efficient this process is in biological system in terms of yield, minimal waste products, accuracy & error correction, and total energy budget. Compare the energy used to bond an amino acid onto the end of a growing protien with the energy consumed by an STM tip when it's moving single atoms around.
Using an STM on a single atom is the equivalent of using an entire skyscraper to skewer & move a pea-sized chunk of beeswax.
4) See my answer in 2). Same problem. But if weak arguments make you queasy, don't think too deeply while reading Drexler.
I have two main problems with Drexler's modus operandi. First, none of his work provides any, ANY, practical or useful approaches for attacking the fundamental problems that face nanotechnology. Pretty pictures drawn with molecular modeling software and parroting the jargon of the physical sciences doesn't count. He's a techno-utopian; he can imagine the promised land, but he can't help you get there. There's more useful technical content in Feynman's original "There's Plenty of Room At the Bottom". And Feynman's essay is about a library shelf shorter than Drexler's collected screeds, and a lot more entertaining to read.
Second, because of his approach--employing attractive but technically directionless metaphors--he is effectively tapping into the collective sci-fi raised consciousness of legions of geeks to--dare I say it?--create a religion. Don't believe me? Look at the other posts to this article; look at the posts to any article on nanotechnology, and their uncritical acceptance of our technological reentrance into the Garden of Eden, Real Soon Now. Look at the idiotic ways that nanotechnology is being promoted (objects copied as freely as MP3s, the end of physical want, resurrection of the cryonics cult popsicles) and look at the idiotic ways it is being opposed (Bill Joy's Chicken Little essay).
There's real, viable, important progress to be made in nanotechnology. Grandstanders like Drexler aren't helping.
>In fact, quantum mechanics specifies a non-zero probability that all the particles in my body will jump 3000 miles to the southeast and I'll appear, intact, in Hawaii
Yeah, but what's the probability of that happening? Somewhat less than Bill Gates dropping out to become a monk, and fulfilling his vow of poverty by writing one 80B$ check to "AC@slashdot.org"
I'm familiar with tunneling, and the probability of even "small" molecules like C60 tunneling is pretty goddamn small.
The probability of a DNA molecule (which is considerably larger) undergoing a tunneling event that leads to a mutation has got to be MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the probability of mutations induced by more mundane causes (X-rays, cosmic rays, natural and manmade chemical mutagens, viruses, simple mistakes in the cell's DNA replication process).
There's a line in the article that goes something like "even physicists don't understand quantum mechanics." But this guy does? Perhaps he'd consider explaining QM to us fools, after he's done revolutionizing evolutionary theory.
Good point. We could end up in a world full of only beautiful animals, just one goddamn peacock species after another...
OTOH, there's plenty of ugly people in that six billion. If you really want them butt-ugly critters, just buy your local genetic engineer a few rounds. Once the beer goggles are on, he'll clone anything. Just don't buy'm too many, he might not be able to get the DNA up into the oocyte.
Well, Scientific American is a good start. So is New Scientist, as another poster mentioned. Physics Today has some cool stuff aimed at the educated nonexpert.
For the younger enthusiast, there's the weekly Science News.
Discover and Popular Science are the scientific equivalent of People. OK for kids, I suppose.
Don't bother with any of the nonjournal chemistry rags. Chemical and Engineering News, for example, is only useful if you want to read badly written hagiography about executives at chemical corporations.
If you're really looking for meatier material, I suggest Science and Nature. They have a mix of science gossip, generalist articles, and specialist articles. If you feel you don't have the background to read the specialist articles, read the lighter stuff for a year--you'll be surprised at what you pick up. And don't bother inquiring about their overpriced subscriptions, just go to your local college library.
The current/. moderation system works pretty well, and there are a lot of great new ideas on this post. However, I'd like to see us become a little more systematic on this issue.
This issue is a classic game theory setup, with defectors (trolls and occasional abusive moderators) and cooperators (everyone else).
The resource we're all concerned with is interest, attention, or mindshare, or whathaveyou. It's not bandwith,/. server load, disk space, etc.--unless you count the amount the rest of us are forced to waste debating the issue. Trolls seek our interest, and hog it to exclude cooperators. Cooperators seek our attention too, and to the extent that they add to the discussion, they create more interest. So it's definitely not a zero-sum game.
Tinkering with the moderation system should be approached by representing its current set of points, etc as a payoff table. The effect of varying payoffs is easily modeled, so enterprising/. readers with game theory experience could help CmdrTaco by examining a myriad of possible payoff tables without forcing the rest of us to suffer through them:) It's often true that modeling doesn't help much with real world problems, but the environment embodied by the/. moderation system is synthetic and has few variables. So it should be possible to model it effectively.
I imagine that the current moderation system is not far from optimal. There are problems, but I'm not aware of any synthetic environment composed entirely of cooperators that is immune from invasion by defectors--except a practically useless environment. However, it is possible to maximize the population of cooperators. The successful result would be the/. equivalent of "Robert's Rules of Order," and would be a significant contribution to the community at large, not just/.
One modification that should be made immediately is to moderate all responses to trolls to -1. Trolls seek our attention, and even the most careful, rational, reasoned rebuttal is a reward to them.
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Well, to address your points:
1) The problem with nanotech is the assumption that familiar macroscopic concepts (gears, pulleys, "assemblers", what have you) can be easily translated to nanoscopic dimensions. In general, they can't because the physical and chemical properties at that scale are different. Stiction is just one specific example of that.
2) Everything is exactly like what it is. Some things are somewhat like things they aren't. For the physical world, the degree of "somewhat" is pretty much independent of convenient or attractive metaphors (unless you believe in deconstructionism). But when you're trying to communicate nonobvious concepts to nonspecialists, you're doomed to using everyday language, which can easily be imprecise, vague, or misleading. Some scientists (Sagan comes to mind) seem to be better at this than others, but they also tend to spend more time at it.
I think it's highly unlikely that Whitesides assumes everything is like chemistry or biology. What he's trying to do is demonstrate that a) we already have nanotechnology (biology) that works so well that we have yet to improve upon it in some of its most mundane aspects, yet we're nowhere near to understanding it, and b) nanotechnology in the sense of nanoscopic analogs of macrosopic mechanical devices is likely to be quite a bit more challenging than common technical sense might suggest.
3) Enzyme structure is 3D, but that 3D structure is determined by its linear sequence of amino acids. How that 3D structure is achieved continues to be a mystery. It's not random thermal motion causing the strand to move through all physically possible conformations until the proper one is found; it's been shown that to do so for any reasonably sized protien would require time on the order of the lifetime of the universe. In some cases, other (3D) protiens appear to assist in the folding of protiens (in 3D space) but of course those helper protiens had to start somewhere... the old chicken & egg problem. Now, how does this relate to a serious problem for nanotech? Well, the point he left out is how incredibly efficient this process is in biological system in terms of yield, minimal waste products, accuracy & error correction, and total energy budget. Compare the energy used to bond an amino acid onto the end of a growing protien with the energy consumed by an STM tip when it's moving single atoms around.
Using an STM on a single atom is the equivalent of using an entire skyscraper to skewer & move a pea-sized chunk of beeswax.
4) See my answer in 2). Same problem. But if weak arguments make you queasy, don't think too deeply while reading Drexler.
I have two main problems with Drexler's modus operandi. First, none of his work provides any, ANY, practical or useful approaches for attacking the fundamental problems that face nanotechnology. Pretty pictures drawn with molecular modeling software and parroting the jargon of the physical sciences doesn't count. He's a techno-utopian; he can imagine the promised land, but he can't help you get there. There's more useful technical content in Feynman's original "There's Plenty of Room At the Bottom". And Feynman's essay is about a library shelf shorter than Drexler's collected screeds, and a lot more entertaining to read.
Second, because of his approach--employing attractive but technically directionless metaphors--he is effectively tapping into the collective sci-fi raised consciousness of legions of geeks to--dare I say it?--create a religion. Don't believe me? Look at the other posts to this article; look at the posts to any article on nanotechnology, and their uncritical acceptance of our technological reentrance into the Garden of Eden, Real Soon Now. Look at the idiotic ways that nanotechnology is being promoted (objects copied as freely as MP3s, the end of physical want, resurrection of the cryonics cult popsicles) and look at the idiotic ways it is being opposed (Bill Joy's Chicken Little essay).
There's real, viable, important progress to be made in nanotechnology. Grandstanders like Drexler aren't helping.
>In fact, quantum mechanics specifies a non-zero probability that all the particles in my body will jump 3000 miles to the southeast and I'll appear, intact, in Hawaii
Yeah, but what's the probability of that happening? Somewhat less than Bill Gates dropping out to become a monk, and fulfilling his vow of poverty by writing one 80B$ check to "AC@slashdot.org"
I'm familiar with tunneling, and the probability of even "small" molecules like C60 tunneling is pretty goddamn small.
The probability of a DNA molecule (which is considerably larger) undergoing a tunneling event that leads to a mutation has got to be MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the probability of mutations induced by more mundane causes (X-rays, cosmic rays, natural and manmade chemical mutagens, viruses, simple mistakes in the cell's DNA replication process).
There's a line in the article that goes something like "even physicists don't understand quantum mechanics." But this guy does? Perhaps he'd consider explaining QM to us fools, after he's done revolutionizing evolutionary theory.
>who's going to bring back the ugly stuff?
Good point. We could end up in a world full of only beautiful animals, just one goddamn peacock species after another...
OTOH, there's plenty of ugly people in that six billion. If you really want them butt-ugly critters, just buy your local genetic engineer a few rounds. Once the beer goggles are on, he'll clone anything. Just don't buy'm too many, he might not be able to get the DNA up into the oocyte.
Well, Scientific American is a good start. So is New Scientist, as another poster mentioned. Physics Today has some cool stuff aimed at the educated nonexpert.
For the younger enthusiast, there's the weekly Science News.
Discover and Popular Science are the scientific equivalent of People. OK for kids, I suppose.
Don't bother with any of the nonjournal chemistry rags. Chemical and Engineering News, for example, is only useful if you want to read badly written hagiography about executives at chemical corporations.
If you're really looking for meatier material, I suggest Science and Nature. They have a mix of science gossip, generalist articles, and specialist articles. If you feel you don't have the background to read the specialist articles, read the lighter stuff for a year--you'll be surprised at what you pick up. And don't bother inquiring about their overpriced subscriptions, just go to your local college library.
The current /. moderation system works pretty well, and there are a lot of great new ideas on this post. However, I'd like to see us become a little more systematic on this issue.
/. server load, disk space, etc.--unless you count the amount the rest of us are forced to waste debating the issue. Trolls seek our interest, and hog it to exclude cooperators. Cooperators seek our attention too, and to the extent that they add to the discussion, they create more interest. So it's definitely not a zero-sum game.
/. readers with game theory experience could help CmdrTaco by examining a myriad of possible payoff tables without forcing the rest of us to suffer through them :) It's often true that modeling doesn't help much with real world problems, but the environment embodied by the /. moderation system is synthetic and has few variables. So it should be possible to model it effectively.
/. equivalent of "Robert's Rules of Order," and would be a significant contribution to the community at large, not just /.
This issue is a classic game theory setup, with defectors (trolls and occasional abusive moderators) and cooperators (everyone else).
The resource we're all concerned with is interest, attention, or mindshare, or whathaveyou. It's not bandwith,
Tinkering with the moderation system should be approached by representing its current set of points, etc as a payoff table. The effect of varying payoffs is easily modeled, so enterprising
I imagine that the current moderation system is not far from optimal. There are problems, but I'm not aware of any synthetic environment composed entirely of cooperators that is immune from invasion by defectors--except a practically useless environment. However, it is possible to maximize the population of cooperators. The successful result would be the
One modification that should be made immediately is to moderate all responses to trolls to -1. Trolls seek our attention, and even the most careful, rational, reasoned rebuttal is a reward to them.