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FutureTechPing!

An emergent technologies list covering biomedical research, fusion power, nanotech, AI robotics, and other related fields. FReepmail to join or drop.

[DBeers]

Instead of employing the traditional trial-and-error method of self-assembly that is used by nanotechnologists and which is found in nature, Torquato and his colleagues start with an exact blueprint of the nanostructure they want to build.

Things that make you go hmmm....

[Threepwood]

Interesting, but we'll have to wait and see.That said, nanotech is incredibly interesting. Maybe in our lifetimes, we'll see the collapse of entire commodity markets because of the cheap nano-versions of certain things. That would be interesting.

[kipita]

"In a sense this would allow you to play God, because the method creates, on the computer, new types of particles whose interactions are tuned precisely so as to yield a desired structure," said Pablo Debenedetti, a professor of chemical engineering at Princeton.

About 250 years ago the average life expectancy was 35 years old. Humans started "playing God" many centuries ago.

[balch3]

Man already tried to play God once. It was called the Tower of Babel, and we know what happened there.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #1

Basically, this means that there is a search space of many possible configurations. Each configuration can be represented as a kind of potential well. Some well is deeper and wider than others, while others are narrower and smaller. Most of the time, we get the configuration with the deeper and wider potential wells. However, we love to get the configuration associated with a narrower and smaller well, which is hard to get to by randomly exploring the search space, which is what traditional method is about. You need to tweak the system in a certain way to push it into a desired well.

Still, this is hardly like building a house based on a blueprint. It is more like navigating a car, with a partially working steering wheel, into a desired pit, avoiding the biggest and widest pit and many others which you are not interested in.

[RandallFlagg]

It'll all go well until they try and unionize. Then, the bulldozers will be unleashed.

[BipolarBob]

Great! Now we can have that transparent aluminum Scotty talked about. Or at least nanophase aluminum.

[MarkT]

Reading this reminds me of Dembski's "The Design Inference." Of course, this current version has as its primal source Man and not some Big Statistician in the Sky. But of course man sprang from nothingness via the big bang which itself was a physical anomaly since the galaxies or universe is and always was.

[HelloooClareece]

Fascinating, thanks for the post.

[ovrtaxt]

I wonder how expensive it would be, on a large scale, to simulate the atomic structure of pure gasoline?

[Walkingfeather]

If this is true, these guys have jumped this field into hyperspace, regarding advancement in this field.

[grey_whiskers]

Torquato and colleagues have published a paper in the Nov. 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, the leading physics journal, outlining a mathematical approach that would enable them to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another.

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. (Richard Feynman) Even though Feynman predicted nanotechnology elsewhere, my money is against the form described in this article. :-)

Cheers!

[SunkenCiv]

"futurist Eric Drexler daringly predicted a new world where miniaturized robots would build things one molecule at a time"

Really puts the whole "illegal aliens are stealing all our jobs" thing into perspective. ;')

[BlueMondaySkipper]

"The honeycomb lattice is a simple example but it illustrates the power of our approach," Torquato said. "We envision assembling even more useful and unusual structures in the future."