Archive for December, 2006

“Anyone still thinking molecular manufacturing is crazy should take a good long look at the alternative.”

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

Just in time for the holidays, Rocky Rawstern has published my response to a question too new to be “age-olde.”

“If you had the attention of the entire world, what would you say regarding molecular manufacturing?”

To quote Mark Twain, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” I provide the response below, which is not meant to rile my fellow scientists (some of my best friends are crystallographers).

I’d take a very different approach to the question. I think it safe to assume that more people still rely on the plow than the microprocessor as a means to individual sustenance, if for no other reason than that most people who work with plows know how to fix’em, and I don’t think I know more than a handful of people who wouldn’t ask for a cattle prod when I asked them to reseat RAM. I perceive the gap between molecular manufacturing and the microprocessor to be on par with the plow/processor gap, which is to say that what underlies the gap is so fundamentally different from the technology people are familiar with/oblivious to that words (well, my words) offer little insight into just what’s ahead. In America’s case, we’ve seen that negative campaigns work wonders for capturing the public’s attention. How fortunate are we for that? Therefore, I’d address the public not as a scientist trying to wax mechanosynthetic on molecular manufacturing, but as a molecular manufacturing enthusiast (and I’ve NO DOUBT that we’re all headed in the direction of absolute atomic control and precision in our manufacturing processes because, quite simply, it makes absolutely no scientific sense to stop at some size regime en route to such control) taking a good long look at the state of the world and wondering just how odd what we do now is going to look in a century (if we all make it that long).

So, at the risk of offending just about every researcher on the planet (given my background, perhaps myself under different circumstances), I’d probably spend a good long paragraph taking the position inflammatory to the state-of-the-art and ask questions such as, “Does it not seem a little strange to everyone that people measured in meters and centimeters are currently using equipment measured in meters and centimeters to build molecules and structures measured in nanometers?! Does it seem a bit unusual that a team of trained Ph.D.’s will spend years of their lives in multi-step organic syntheses involving large quantities of starting materials and solvents, fractional yields and highly condition-sensitive chemical reactions, just to make a drug molecule that the biomolecular factories in simple sea sponges will spit out as a part of daily activities? Are not numerous scenes from ‘Quest for Fire’ invoked when considering that the most heralded means of atomically characterizing molecules and proteins comes from slowly growing crystals large enough for a researcher to see (if they can grow them) so that they can be picked up with tweezers and placed into a diffractometer the size of a closet in a three-star hotel? Does it make sense that nanometer-regime microprocessor chip features are attainable only in some of the world’s largest fabrication facilities? And really think about scale for a moment. If we ballpark the Sears Tower to 500 meters (cutting the building off somewhere between the roof and the spire) and take the period at the end of this sentence as being 0.5 millimeter, we get a factor of 1 million. If we take that same period and one atom, which I also ballpark to 0.5 nanometer (and I do that to make the math look easy. Most of the atoms in your person have diameters closer to 0.25 nanometer), we get that same ratio. Does it not make at least 1 million times more sense to manipulate that period with a desktop PC or, if you can find them, pencil and paper than a physical manipulator the size of the Sears Tower? Even cells a fraction of the size of that period have had a good long ride in this solar system performing feats of atomic precision without the benefit of calculus or 6-sigma. Does it not make some greater sense generally to manipulate building blocks, be they atoms or molecules, using equipment within, just for the sake of argument, only a few orders of magnitude larger than those building blocks?!”

Good heavens! Anyone still thinking molecular manufacturing is crazy should take a good long look at the alternative.

If Ray Kurzweil is right, I won’t have to wait the usual year to regret this being posted. It might drop to 3 months!

nanoscale-materials-and-nanotechnolog.blogspot.com/2006/12/nanotechnology-q-pt-i-more_24.html
nanoscale-materials-and-nanotechnolog.blogspot.com
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
www.kurzweilai.net

free press, molecular manufacturing and nanotechnology, six degrees | Comments (0)

The Ted Turner-ization of Drexlerian (and other) Nanotechnology

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

In the physical sciences, as is reportedly the case in other fields, a picture is worth 1000 words (within error bars). The goal of any good science image is to have the first 5 of those words not be “What the hell is that?” The description of a protein binding pocket without visual aids is about as painful to listen to as the description of a car engine without diagrams. These discussions are taxing even to people IN the field encompassing the details of the thing being described. In the case of science fields that receive lots of public attention (and nanotechnology is most definitely one of those), the need for visuals unencumbered by the assumptions of one’s barricaded discourse community are all the more important.

It is with the above in mind that I post a nice little trick for improving the… readability of an atomically-precise image. The structure below is a low friction bearing assembly first posted off-somewhereville way back by Rocky Rawstern at the nanotech-now.com gallery. In preparation for a guest appearance in an upcoming Wiley-VCH book by Rolf Frobose, I wanted to do something beyond the simple “exploded view” of the two parts to show all of the interactions occurring between the fixed and rotating rings and the carbon nanotube shaft. As default-rendered by most chemistry programs, the structure would appear as the four atom-colored images at left. The dominance of carbon and hydrogen is obvious by the grey/white in the figure, while the remaining atom types pop out when you stare long enough. Among the many, many useful features in NanoEngineer-1 is the ability to colorize individual parts or pieces of parts, as well as to hide atoms to make the cut-away views (top right of the four-image sets). Using colors from the default palette, the atom-colored assembly can be turned into RGB images (center) that very clearly differentiate the rotating ring (red) from the diamondoid (blue) and nanotube (green) components (the blue and green pieces are covalently bound to one another, not separate). The clear benefit is identification of distinct pieces. Another benefit, to the editor, is the presence of color in the image (grey and white certainly looks technical, but it isn’t very eye-catching). This trick was used in the nanotube junction image in the MTSU manufacturing article from earlier this year (which, although useful for showing all of the bound components, is a bit of an eye-sore). The loss in such a globally-colorized image is the atomic detail (there is no division beyond atomic radius for C, N, O, H, etc.) that may be unimportant to the casual observer but that is of some significance to a researcher trying to establish atomic structure and connectivity. Click on the image below for the full version.

The obvious compromise between component identification and atomic detail is the blending of the two views (right). In the assembly, this is performed in Photoshop by layering the colorized image above the atom-color image and changing the transparency of the colorized image (here, to 30%). There are some obvious benefits to this approach that go beyond the ease of viewing. First, superimposing the semi-transparent color on the atom-color image immediately provides the global detail in the colorized image with the atomic detail of the atom-color. Consider the time it would take to define the color of each hydrogen atom in each part, making the rotating ring some light shade of red, then defining some light shade of blue for one piece, some shade of green for the other, then doing the same thing for ALL of the unique atom types. Second, you haven’t altered the original images (which seems like a simpleton point until you attempt to revisit the design a year later and can no longer provide the typical chemical (atom-colored) or instanta-fragment (colorized) views without re-rendering everything again (provided you saved the source files).

Quick and easy and a nice compromise of the two extremes. In the event anyone wants to try it out (or, please, suggest better approaches. I’m good with what POV-Ray I know, which is remarkably little considering what people can do with it), the two POV-Ray files for the cut-away view in grey and color are provided below, along with the final images and close-up overlay for each (there are no additional .inc or .ini files needed here; everything is in the .pov file). Again, click on the individual images for the full version.