At the risk of digressing this thread a bit further, Richard Jones has a recent blog post about Drexler and Feynman. Here are two other blog posts where he talks about energy in relation to nanomachines.
I don’t even know what you think you are trying to argue here. I’m telling you that the reality is, nano-machines are a very very long way away, and you’re showing me all these wonderful people discussing magic machines that don’t exist. As far as I know, Feynman didn’t really say anything scientists weren’t already thinking in “There’s plenty of Room at the Bottom.” More likely, he’s the first person to lecture on it, that anyone would listen to.
Also, that Richard Jones blog is just bazaar when it talks about the “nano schizm” being a problem in the US but not in Japan. Nanotechnology is moving forward in the US just fine, it’s just that a bunch sciency bloggers talking about molecular assemblers has fuck all to do with reality. It is exactly the new physics of confined states that Feynman implied didn’t exist that makes their bulk properties useful. The current race, is to make use of those properties. Machines aren’t even on the table.
I think you’re making my post out to be far more…aggressive, than it was meant to be. I posted those links for the OP because I thought those posts could give some decent information on how nanobots or machines might work, or at least be powered. The first link about Drexler and Feynman was something that I coincidentally found today while browsing his blog, and which I thought shed some light on Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology. Jones also does state in the first post that Feynman’s lecture wasn’t all that significant.
In the post about the DNA based motor, Jones is talking about an actual paper published in Physical Review Letters. In the post titled Nanobots, nanomedicine, Kurzweil, Freitas and Merkle, he’s debating about how future nanobots may work; those people know very well that this kind of technology does not exist yet. The very fact that the technology is a long way off seems to me the primary reason why they’re having a spirited debate over it. Richard Jones isn’t just a “sciency blogger”, he’s a professor of physics, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was the Senior Strategic Advisor for Nanotechnology in the UK.
How good of you to cherry-pick one part of the post and conveniently ignore everything else. It’s a nice diversion from your strategic withdrawal from you previous straw man argument.
Again, we have a model for the capability of “machines” capable of replicating and synthesizing proteins; every living organism does this on the intracellular level thousands of times a second, and we currently have the ability to assemble relatively simple molecules from their amino acid precursors in regulated fashion, so the basic principles are understood. What we currently lack is the means to model and synthesize novel complex polypeptides.
Will we do this with articulated robot arms and miniature steam engines? No, of course not, any more than a modern IC computer uses thermionic tubes. But the basic means to do so are well within physics and chemistry as we understand it. Will we have commercial nano-mechanisms in five years? Highly doubtful. Fifty years? It seems quite possible, even likely. Five hundred years? Virtually without a doubt it will be conventional, if not passe, technology.
Stranger
Then there really isn’t much disagreement. I do think that the comment about nanotech schizm to be strange though. There certainly isn’t a schizm anywhere important. I’ve seen many ideas about how nanobots may work. The best ideas are biologically based. They are also about as far off as fusion power. In fact, I would say they are further off. The materials side of the so called “nano schizm” is winning only because the transform society side doesn’t have anything based in reality. Nanotechnology research is going forward, because they are useful as materials.