Tech Talk

Richard Jones is one of the more vocal people pushing the split between wet and dry nanotechnology and one of the main people pushing for the categorization into evolutionary versus revolutionary/radical nanotechnology.

He and you are trying to split off work such as DNA nanotechnology and protein work which was part of the original vision and writings of the the pro-MNT camp. Anything that becomes "legitimate" is ported over to the evolutionary side.

Drexler's 1981 paper

http://e-drexler.com/p/04/01/0228drexler1981.html

Wet is good.
Dry is good.
the point is to get to a fast and robust molecularly precise programmatic control.

The pushback is not against the goals of better technology, the pushback is against strawmen and attempts to rewrite history and to marginalize early and continuing proponents of the technology.

Here is the recent work and progress
http://www.molecularassembler.com/Nanofactory/Publications.htm

I responded to Richard Jones (so the claim that there was no response to his 6 points is invalid. I think he was hoping to draw out a response from Chris Phoenix or Drexler or someone else.) :

Brian,

Apologies for the delay in posting your comment, but your full response contained too many links and was automatically put on hold until I manually posted your comment. It still needed to be edited somewhat based on the guidelines I described.

I will not argue for Richard Jones for the simple fact that he can do so himself more eloquently and forcefully than I. As an outsider to the argument, and with no ideological axe to grind, this is my perception of the landscape.

I will only comment that if indeed you speak for the MNT community, I am gratified that you see both Wet and Dry approaches to "radical nanotechnology" as worthy or pursuit.

My point is that science should be the guiding principle (read: theory, experimentation, conclusions) not adherence to ideology.

Where are the comment guidelines ? I do not see them.

Your quick perusal of Foresight found support for some wet nanotech because it was always a lie that Foresight and Drexler were against wet nanotech. If you dig deeper you can see a lot more about what actually has happened and is happening. So you republished a lie/slander (Just like many others have). Do you have some guideline for what you do when you make that kind of mistake ?

Do you decide to put in some effort to research the other side to make amends for a slanted posting ?

If you need help (which it clearly looks like you do), you can contact me (blwang at gmail dot com) and I can provide facts, history and the current situation. (not ideology) It could be interesting if you are really interested into insight into tomorrow's technology.

What bothers me personally about NNI and the stealing of terms.

1. The original interest and impulse to get it started was clearly the promise articulated in Drexler's books and the work of Foresight. then it got hijacked and they will spend even 5% of money to really scientifically test the viability of some of the more ambitious goals.

2. I feel it is akin to the situation where you would have a project called the Life Extension initiative. Then you fund cosmetics, botox and vitamin research. Legitimate industries that make money, but why do you have to label them the billion dollar life extension initiative ?

The guys running the NNI and in industry are constantly stealing terms coined on the molecular nanotechnology side and repurposing them. As an MBA with an understanding of marketing, I understand why they are baiting and switching. I am not sure why you as a journalist would want to give them a free pass on that behavior. The latest term that is being stolen is nanofactory.

3. So what you described as:
>So how do you get the discussion back to your >direction, well it goes something like >this: “Okay, okay, but you guys are talking >about ‘evolutionary nanotechnology’, we’re >talking about ‘revolutionary nanotechnology’.”

Actually played out as.
One group has been using the term nanotechnology for over a decade with a particular clear definition. Then some people with money come in and steal the term. They define it as anything with a feature size of 1-100 nanometers. That way they can include multi-billion semiconductor research. All the journalists follow along because they can't be bothered to read more than press releases. Clearly the guys with a billion dollars are more legitimate.
Now the first guys have to add qualifiers to communicate what they are talking about. Their original term was hijacked.

It is as if microelectronics (before it was big money) got redefined as things smaller than a breadbox by farmers.) Then the people who are trying to develop microelectronics have to call it radical microelectronics to distinguish it from farmers getting funded to make cookies (smaller than a breadbox, but getting a billion dollar per year in research.)

Farming and cookie making would be a real industry and worthy of research money. Radical microelectronics could be dismissed as impossible, not so important even if possible, hard and not worth doing, crackpot etc...

Those valid industries should not need to steal terms and slander competing scientific concepts and theories and people, but they do.

You can see that part of your confusion (what you found perplexing) is that you let the science aspect of the discussion mislead you from the more basic marketing and politics.

The science part of it ends up being a red herring. It is only used to club the group that was given no research funding.

Where are your radical dry nanotechnology scientific results ?
Look at all the scientists we have working on what consider nanotechnology.
Oh that's right they know that we will pay them and you will not.
Wasn't your dry nanotechnology supposed to be inevitable and easy ?
Oh, you had not impossible based on known physics and science. Achievable if worked upon with a focused and funded research program.
What progress have you made ? Some dedicated people like Freitas and Merkle have performed a computational chemistry analysis that validates the steps of mechanosynthesis ? Well that is too technical and why have they not spent decades validating some million or billion molecule end products and all the intermediate products between here and there ? BTW: we will not pay for that study, because without that study we will not believe it is possible. BTW: we are being scientific and fair. What came first the chicken or the egg...why the unfunded computational analysis proving every aspect of chicken feasability and the growth from single cell to trillion cell chicken of course.

how come we do not have the miracle chickens you talked about 25 years ago ? clearly they are impossible and you are a crackpot.

Why has no one who is working on their computational proof of mechanochemistry taken time to answer my 6 unfunded labors of scientific Hercules ? I am just trying to help validate your field. Really I am on your side.

As I noted in one of my early cutoff posts, Richard has been doing good work getting the ideas factory project going. It shows that good things can happen if you actually try to do something and try to figure out ways to make things work.

http://ideasfactory.wordpress.com/2007/01/16/directed-reconfigurable-nanomachines/

I am coming down on you for what you wrote Dexter and sometimes I am mocking it. The reason is that a lot of what you wrote deserves to be mocked. You did a poor job of it.

>Stain-resistant pants clearly don’t have the
>sex appeal of a factory on a table top that
>could make anything you wanted just by
>pressing the button: “Ferrari”. But there you
>have it. The dialogue had been transformed in
>large part because of money.

This is fairy tale level acceptance of bait and switch. We went out casually looking for a table top factory to build me a Ferrari, then we got sold some nice pants. Now I will spread the word of mouth about how happy I am with nice pants and not a Ferrari.

If you sent someone out with billion dollars a year for X years of research and they came back with that when you sent them out for the first thing, should you not be outraged. Outraged like million dollar toilets outraged. No, you write an article saying how this is a good thing and sing the praises of the salesman of the pants and misdirected research budgets for relabelled science. You drank powerful Koolaid.

I also recognize that you are repeating the NNI and mainstream party line. However, Koolaid is Koolaid. I don't want to pretend like there was some kind of real scientific debate or that there was a fair scientific bakeoff done to compare competing ideas when there was none or pussyfoot around and not call ripoffs or biases what they are.

Whoa, Brian, slow down!

As one of the main representatives of the "dry" side, I don't find this post nearly as objectionable as you do.

The recognition that the NNI eclipsed Drexler by having more money seems accurate and worth noting. There's more to say, of course--like the fact that some of the eclipsing was deliberate, caused by a perception that worries about grey goo would hurt funding. But Dexter is not the enemy here.

I've seen Richard Jones's six points, and it seems better to answer such issues indirectly and at length (see http://crnano.org/essays06.htm) than to get into a debate with him on questions framed by him.

The reason I think "hard" nanotech is more important is that, if it works as expected, it will have far higher performance than water-immersed nanomachines ever could. But that doesn't mean I dislike "soft" machines. About once a year I flip-flop on whether soft machines are the best path to hard machines, or whether a more direct approach (e.g. scanning probe chemistry, as Freitas is working toward) will get us there first.

So let's simmer down and look for points of agreement.

Chris

Brian,

Thank you for your impassioned posts. I will try to look past being termed a slanderer, someone to be mocked, and generally not up to the task, and instead focus on your constructive insights of which there were many.

Just as background, I first came across MNT back in 1998 when I was writing a published report on Giant Magneto Resistance (GMR). I read some papers and presentations of Ralph Merkle while he was at IBM, and used some of my understanding of these works to provide some background to the report to show where manipulation at the atomic scale could someday lead. So, I am not entirely new to this area, but I appreciate your offer to enlighten me, and may well take you up on it.

From your impassioned description of the NNI/MNT plot line, I can sense your bitterness that may well extend to the greater MNT community. I am not unaware of this and I was not attempting to dismiss this, but rather point it out.

In fact, I was a bit surprised myself to return to the nanotechnology discussion in 2002 to see how the landscape had changed from 1998(between 1998 and 2001 I was focused primarily on sensor technologies, robotics and optical networking) and was now about advanced materials--I was intrigued.

My point is that I am not the "Evil Empire". I am really not an adherent to the NNI party line, or any other line, just an observer, and I hope an impartial one.

I would like to take the fig leaf offered by Chris Phoenix (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology) and see if we can't find common ground...I hope that you will take it as well.

I will simmer down. However, I point out that being the reasonable and quiet allows the "mainstream" to not only carry on business as usual which they would anyway since they have money and influence and are able to casually rewrite history. They do not even need to work that hard at it. Issue press releases, dismiss the "crackpots" and claim anything that works is not part of what was the original vision. I will also point out that all of my original less impassioned comments made back in 2006 to the original postings were ignored when you made a surface review of what happened.

To be clear: I did not say that you were part of any Evil Empire, or a slanderer etc... I said (in a more aggressive form, for which I will apologize) that the article was not well researched and ended up repeating incorrect statements. You had reached the point of confusion about the situation because you were trying to reconcile a false statement with observable truth, but you did not dig deeper to understand observable truth.

NNI and those associated with it are not an evil empire. They are using standard business practices and the practices for getting government funding.

-Change definitions of something that is going to be allocated money so that your thing qualifies (more bluntly a legal form of bait and switch or branding and purposeful brand/trademark confusion.) There clearly was a public nanotechnology brand prior to 1995-1998 (but no legal trademark)

Are we agreed in the lead up to NNI funding that this is what happened ? Ultimately I recognize that this does not matter since they have had and continue to have the money. Eventually the molecular manufacturing will be worked upon because it will work and people will make money from it.

As I said, the NNI action was not illegal. And is common in government and academic funding. Even for things which are more simple to understand. How much money tagged for building roads and transportation actually is used for that simple purpose ?

http://www.common-sense.org/text_files/consider_this/consider_this_021115.html

Does anyone say if highway money is spent on something else that building highways is impossible ?
If bridges that used to take 2-3 years to build now take 5 times as long and cost 10 times as much even after adjusting for inflation. Is this because bridges have become harder to build ? Or is the answer useless bureaucracy and mismanagement and misdirected funds.

The nanotechnology brand confusion and having a confused record of events make it difficult to even communicate on the topic without a lot of pre-amble effort and research.

So if you Dexter want to set impartially set the record straight then you have to work to cut through the misdirection.

If you want to look at the 6 challenges. I have already provided some answers to it in comments to the original posting. I have also indicated the absurdity of the 6 challenges which I exposed when I indicated how they were unnecessary and Richard clarified how high the bar was that he wanted to set.
Are we agreed that the "6 challenges" are unnecessary and absurd ?

A recent example of attempted redefinition is Mike Roco's recent definition of "molecular nanotechnology." This has always meant the same as molecular manufacturing - entirely Drexler's term and meaning. But now Roco is saying it means doing intricate things with molecules. I hope that journalists will not let this slide, but I'm not optimistic.

On Jones's challenges: They are certainly not absurd. My problem with them is that they are formulated in a way that adds unnecessarily to the perception of difficulty of molecular manufacturing.

For example, in the first challenge: "We need to know what is the stable structure at equilibrium - that is the structure with the overall lowest free energy. It may be possible to make structures that are metastable - that is, structures that are not at equilibrium, but which have a low enough probability of transforming to the stable state that they are usable for practical purposes."

"It may be possible" is misleading - of course it is possible to build some metastable structures, and impossible or near-impossible to build others. The question is which ones--which Jones raises, but in a way that makes it sound (to me at least) like stable structures are desirable, and (all) metastable structures are second-best and may not work. It should be noted that diamond itself is metastable.

I found that my exchanges with Jones tended to shift from discussion to debate, which I find far less constructive, so I don't usually engage him directly anymore. And I find a number of debate-like twists in Jones's Challenges, so I don't engage them directly either. But that does not mean he doesn't ask good questions. We will indeed need to know which structures will reconstruct, so we can avoid them. But I see this as an engineering project, not a Challenge.

Chris

Ps. My link above is broken because the parser included a ) that it shouldn't have. The correct link is http://crnano.org/essays06.htm Dexter, perhaps you can fix that?

Pps. On re-reading the Challenges, I find one point where purely technical detail seems useful. On the motor work-function question, Jones notes that metals may be problematic; I counter-note that graphite and CVD diamond have work functions differing by about a volt, implying that metal may not need to be used. http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/Nanofactory.htm#s8.2
(next to last paragraph in the section)

To further clarify the collective absurdity and the hypocracy (ignore previous post which had 2 links and not one and is the filter):

Those who follow a key proposal of Richard Smalley made was to create an energy distribution infrastructure using carbon nanotubes.

http://cohesion.rice.edu/CentersAndInst/CNST/emplibrary/Rice%20University%20Engineering%20Alumni%20Seminar%2010-11-2006.pdf

Carbon nanotubes at the nanoscale can transmit 1000 times more electricity than copper. A similar challenge before they could pursue make such claims would be to cut off all government funding for all of their carbon nanotube work back in 1995 when he first proposed it and have them develop a large proof that every aspect of their plan could be done with computational chemistry up to the macroscale. Note: even with all the money given to Rice University and others in the carbon nanotube research area (which I agree is ultimately worthwhile) they have yet to exceed the electricity tranmission capability of copper at the macroscale.

So their claims are also science fiction in that they have not proven their vision step by step before they start or get any money.

Notice: in the pdf of Smalley-arian (just using the same kind of categorization that they use) that the first slide that they have is label the nanotechnology that they do not want to work on right now Science Fiction.

Their technology proposal is also behind what is being done with superconductors. (superconductor wiring NY project announced)

Their energy proposals and grand challenges also are biased against all other technical options where they do not get the money.
(I have links at my site where I review the costs of all energy technology, nuclear, wind, different kinds of solar)

So is their behavior letting science be the guiding principle ? (read: theory, experimentation, conclusions)

One more thought on Jones's Challenges: They have been incorporated, along with a number of others, into a page on Robert Freitas's Nanofactory Collaboration website:
http://www.molecularassembler.com/Nanofactory/Challenges.htm

This is probably now a better place to look than Jones's original post.

Chris

I had indicated that they are unnecessary and absurd as prerequesites to any real funding for projects for the development of molecular manufacturing, which is what Richard Jones had been stating in my comment exchanges with him. As part of a long term and funded development and determining precisely whether certain specific goals are achievable then they make sense.
They can also be discussed as possible issues to be designed around when in a bootstrap phase or as items for funded experimental investigation.
I had presented information on technical points on why the 6 items were not showstoppers to proceeding to making funded attempts to making things work along this pathway. That was when Richard Jones rolled out his statement that before any pretty pictures or simulations of a universal gear get put out to the public then it must have every synthesis step detailed and computationally analyzed for stability. That was why I made the statement about the chicken and the egg to illustrate why Richard had crossed over to being silly.

The challenges when reframed as Robert Freitas and Chris Phoenix have done, can be part of a viable and useful discussion, where we focus on science and try to figure what will work and what will not and how we need to modify the details.

The larger context that wraps around the science was what was referred to in the initial post, which if there is to be a correction or modification to it then I would like to see it. I am not beating a dead horse, because just as in the case with the challenges postings from 2006. We could move onto a different apparently constructive place in the comments, but 99% of people will not read the comments. Plus we could clarify and correct the statements about the original postings but the summarization of what happened could remain distorted. Again this is what has played out from 2006.

Also, this posting is linked from nanotech-now.com and nanowerk.com and other places. Most people just see the title and a one or two sentence abstract.

How much does just fact and science really decide what happens with scientists ?

This article in the ny Times describes what happened with metamaterials
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/science/12invis.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=science

Metamaterials and things with negative index of refraction.

Dr. Smith, then at the University of California, San Diego, attended a talk by Dr. Pendry at a conference in 1999. He and his colleagues built the first metamaterial to combine electric and magnetic behavior.

The journal Physical Review Letters rejected his scientific paper describing the experiment, considering it simplistic and uninteresting. Only then did Dr. Smith come upon Dr. Veselago’s work on negative refraction and the larger implications of the experiment. “We had it, but we didn’t realize it,” said Dr. Smith, who is now at Duke. “Then I rewrote the abstract, and it was accepted.”

That set off a contentious back and forth that lasted several years between researchers who made and measured negative-refraction metamaterials and those who said that the experiments showed nothing of the sort, that negative refraction was at best an illusion and violated the laws of physics.

Part of the difficulty in resolving the controversy was that the negative refraction experiments were at microwave wavelengths. Designing metamaterials for shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies like visible light is more difficult, because fewer materials are transparent at the higher frequencies.

This year, researchers at the Ames Laboratory in Iowa and Karlsruhe University in Germany reported making a metamaterial that had a negative index of refraction for a visible wavelength.

Some critics remain unmollified. Nicolás García of the Spanish National Research Council still calls Dr. Pendry’s statements on negative refraction “propaganda.” But today, most physicists accept the negative refraction interpretation.

The upstart idea has been able to gain traction in that case because a small group of researchers with their own funding were able to do the work needed to prove their case and get momentum. But in the years before then many of the critics were not giving the new idea a fair shake and most were not using science (experiments) to prove their case..otherwise the critics would have performed the tests that proved that they were wrong.

Does money go to the best ideas on the basis of per science?

Nuclear fusion tokomaks have the most funding. Is that the best idea for fusion ? Are there level playing field science experiment comparisons about how to proceed there ?

It is not a general matter of conspiracies or evil empires but it is a culture of a certain amount of personal biases, close mindedness as well as excessive self interest dominating over science. Innovation is then slowed.

Companies like Google have what appears to be a better model, where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time and resources on non centrally planned projects. A 10-20% budget for a true free market and open competition for research ideas is what is needed to let the laws of nature limit what is or is not possible and to accelerate innovation.

Brain, I disagree with you when you say Dexter did a poor job of it.

Dexter is right in voicing his opinion!

I used to be with Warwick University UK, and I kno wwhat Dexter is talking about. Warwick has a very reputable nanotechnology department. Professors like Julian Gradner, Dave Hutchins and Gan Tat Hean were my colleagues

Dr. Colin Fu

Colin