[extropy-chat] British Royal Society Workshop Commentary

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 11:43:40AM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:

> I'd suggest that what we need today are works that get criticized.
> Criticism is how science advances.  Avoiding criticism, such as by
> the tactic I discussed earlier of shifting the burden of proof, is a
> counter-productive strategy which must be abandoned.  Your critic is
> your best friend.

The most critical area of machine-phase system is mechanosynthesis.
(Not tribo- and piezochemistry & Co, something like
<http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/7840/7840notw5.html> )

(An exhaustive search would require several queries. If anyone
would want to compile an exhaustive list on the state of the 
art in experimental manipulative proximal probe for chemical
bond breaking and formation I'd appreciate if you'd post the
list here).

Due to lack of control at the tip the state of the art
is necessarily crude, and will remain so until we can build
intricate nanostructures by whatever means. Then, suddenly,
you fall into the bootstrap loop, and generate lots of fancy
papers, eventually resulting in a full self-rep closure device,
after which everybody goes wild, and produces lots of completely
novel designs we yet have no idea of.

Because of this machine-phase chemistry/mechanosynthesis is
limited to computational chemistry, which is still not regarded
as a real science by the synthetic chemist (at times people
actually do publish bogus results, which are difficult to
falsify in absence of experimental validation).

In a nutshell, this is why you don't get a lot of comments
on Drexler/Merkle nanotechnology from experts outside of the
circle. This is why it appears so sterile/snake oily to the
established science.

Which is why we're most likely to see bootstrap initiated
from the biopolymer/synthetic people, which don't have such
handicap, and have large budgets, being prolific.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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