How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Nanobots
My feeling was always this: I am not a scientist nor do I pretend to be one. As a journalist, though, I do possess a pretty decent bullshit detector. And I knew that those who believe that advanced nanotechnology is feasible were being marginalized for reasons that had everything to do with public relations and nothing to do with real science.
With me, it was never really about whether advanced nanotechnology was possible. I am not qualified to make that determination. What bothered me as a journalist was to see my colleagues sneer at a point of view rather than give it a full airing.
So, much to the annoyance of many of my colleagues at Small Times, the “small tech” magazine and website I helped launch back in 2001, I began my Howard Lovy’s NanoBot experiment to try to give voice to those who were being pushed to the sidelines. The launch of my blog was probably directly responsible for my summary execution from Small Times in 2004 — just a few weeks after the birth of my first son.
When I began writing about science, I had just moved back to Michigan from New York, where I was managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), a kind of wire service for Jewish newspapers. I covered, among other things, the situation in the Mideast. I had enough and was eager to write about science where — unlike the Middle East, so I thought — things were either true or not true, with nobody arguing about whose history you want to believe.
Boy, was I ever wrong. The raging debate between nanotech pioneers Rick Smalley and Eric Drexler made the Israelis and Palestinians seem like they were playing with cap guns in comparison.
As we all know, real science does not care about politics. So, after the nanotech bubble burst and the business and investment community moved on to other things, the science is still developing at a normal pace.
What I have done since then is straddle both worlds. I have spent a decade writing about both the long-term and short-term possibilities of nanotechnology. I know “nanobusiness” as it exists today and I still follow, with delight, the very real developments along the way to molecular machines.
I plan on using this space to highlight not only the short-term nanotech that you might read elsewhere, but also draw to your attention the work of real scientists who are — like the fictional, yet inspirational Phineas and Ferb — creating nanobots.
Well, yeah, but how are we doing on locating Frankenstein’s brain?
Or that DoDo bird.
My grandchildren introduced me to Phineas and Ferb. It’s a cartoon that has a lot that isn’t aimed at children but not in a bad way. Lot’s of geeky goodness in that show.
Tuff Gum!
This proves that nanotech is a fraud. No way there’s 104 days of summer vacation!
It’s over here!
Let’s just hope that Dr. Doofenshmirtz does not learn to build a nano-inator.
I am looking forward to reading your future posts here about nanotech.
Very interesting. I will read your reports from the nanofield.
Scott Locklin, physicist & quant, takes issue with the nanotechnology idea here:
http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/nano-nonsense-25-years-of-charlatanry/
No, the article you link to takes issue with Eric Drexler, not with the idea of nanotechnology. There are other people who are more-involved with developing real nanotech than Drexler. There are other visions, other paths. I’ll highlight them in future columns.
Apparently, you have a problem with reading. I think Drexler is an amusing fellow, but the snake oil he’s selling (Nanotech) is complete nonsense. I did go into a fair amount of detail there. Do I have to write about this awful topic again?
Clarke’s Three Laws are three “laws” of prediction formulated by the British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It seems like a field that still has the potential to create great things in spite of naysayers! I’ll be interested to see what you have to share with us
If Man was meant to fly God would have given him wings. All attempts to develop flying machines are doomed to failure.
Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society, famously declared in 1895: “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson describes a nanotech future in which the world has survived several nanotech virus wars and where computing is done with physical machines not electricity, Babbage style.
Phineas and Ferb totally rock. We’re all adults in my house and we watch it.
And don’t these people realize how many things written in science fiction actually came true? Maybe not exactly as written, but close enough.
In one of the first episodes I watched with my grandchildren (“Out to Launch”), the boys were trying to build a rocket to fly to a star their dad had named after them. They kept trying to derive the rocket equation and getting it slightly wrong, causing the rocket to blow up. My grandkids just looked at me funny as I was laughing out loud. First, having the rocket equation in the cartoon was geeky goodness and making fun of the whole “pay money to name a star after yourself” stupidity was a bonus.
For any geek who hasn’t seen Phineas and Ferb, you can view entire episodes on YouTube.
Better start making air filters that clean nanobots from the ambient air.
Hackers will be spraying them out their planes over cities.
If you think a botnet attack by millions of slave computers is bad, wait until you experience a botnet attack by millionx of zombie humans.
Wouldn’t it be loverly.
We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Existence as you know it is over.
Resistance is futile.
“nanotechnology” is engineers trying to muscle in on chemistry. Your “nano machine” is what we call an Enzyme.
Maybe, but when an enzyme is engineered by scientists for desired effects to produce new pharmaceuticals, fuel or food, is that pure chemistry? Or is that engineering, too? Perhaps both? Or, as it is in nanotechnology, all these disciplines are converging at the nanoscale.
It is kind of a world unseen by the chattering classes. It is going forward by leaps and bounds and the 99% news media sees none of it. I particularly would like to keep up with the Soccer II and the DNA sequences they have uncovered.
For those who haven’t heard the Soccer II was a ship that went to sea a few years ago with DNA sequencing equipment and began to sequence DNA of creatures around the Black Smokers and other exotic regions of the oceans.
I would also like to hear about the protein folding and chemistry design software that is around some of the colleges. Physics software for high school students would be good for my niece and nephews would b go too.
Call me when they actually manage to do something USEFUL.
Targeted drug delivery to treat cancer, smaller and faster computer chips. They seem pretty useful to me.
Phineas and Ferb rule!