Replies

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.

I notice the funding finally came from the Dep. of Energy..

Sounds like someone there is thinking clearly..
Consider atomic energy, and custom designed nuclear fuel rods, with a safety factor added by seperating uranium or plutonium atoms with something like carbon (or silicon) nanotubes..
Then consider those carbon (or silicon) nanotubes are constructed to have an inner diameter of say, the size of a hydrogen atom..
You could now feed hydrogen into a nuclear reaction on the atomic level... One hydrogen atom at a time.. ( with several billion individual hydrogen feeder tubes being controlled at once.. )
This could be a crude sort of fusion reactor..
The fission reactor providing an energy source as a "starter" much like a diesel engine..

A physicist could probably tear this idea apart in a couple of minutes..(seconds) but I will revel in my genius for the moment.. ;o)

Good exposition for the lay person, but when working with computers, it is easy to redefine the parameters describing the Born-Oppenheimer hypersurface describing the 3-D interaction potential in any way you see fit, to "define" molecules which will pack in any particular lattice you want. But in the real world, the molecules have only one specific way of interacting with their fellow building blocks, and if that doesn't lead to the structure you want to build, you're SOL.

Another practical problem here is that the deep narrow wells are energetically (and entropically) favored.

Getting the molecules to choose the wide shallow wells could be done in principle with some work, but the effective yield of the synthetic process would be low.

Furthermore the structures would be sensitive to heat and vibration or shock...

Cheers!

John Ringo uses this thinking in his "Legacy of the Aldenata" series of SF books (that's both Sci Fi and special forces). It was a logical extension of the work already being done, at least to him.

(T)heir method of manufacture involved using swarms of nannites to build products atom by atom in vats. This gave them the capacity to build materials that violated many "known facts" of materials science; the nannites could make atoms do things that occurred only as low probabilities in any other method.

So that ability to intentionally create basic materials that are highly unlikely hopefully allows the production of building blocks that will be useful. I think these are the "bricks" in his house/architecture analogy, not the whole house. Once you have the capability to "design" the basic materials you should be able to preset them for certain interactions with other basic materials. Straining the analogy, you design "bricks" that adhere to other "bricks" automatically (or some intermediate brick to brick morter), then a layer of "bricks" that connect from bricks to some other material, say a "roof."

Clarke's Magician would be pleased

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(Bonus, there are two corollaries to Clarke's law - can anyone name them?)