[ExI] Smalley vs. Drexler & 3 Dimensions

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 9:23 PM, <natasha at natasha.cc> wrote:

​> ​
> One of my students ask if Drexler or anyone offered an engineering
> solution to Smalley’s juggling (Rotman, 1999) issue that nanorobots would
> have to deal with three dimensions of control while maintaining atoms?
> Students are having a fascinating discussion on the seminal debate and I
> simply don’t have knowledge on this juggling issues.
>
>

*​"​The importance of the number of reactants lies in Smalley’s
argument that “There just isn’t enough room in the nanometer-size reaction
region to accommodate all the fingers of all the manipulators necessary to
have complete control of the chemistry.” ​[...]​ The argument collapses
when we observe that chemical reactions often involve two reactants, such
as in the controlled vacuum conditions used by the scanning tunneling
microscope (STM). Two reactants can be brought together with controlled
trajectories if one reactant is bound to a substrate and the second
reactant is positioned and moved by a single “finger” as has already been
done experimentally. For example, Ho and Lee physically bound a CO molecule
to an iron atom on a silver substrate using an STM. Other approaches are
also possible, Brenner et al. provided a molecular dynamics simulation of
the hydrogen abstraction reaction from a diamond substrate.​"*

From:​


http://www.imm.org/publications/sciamdebate2/smalley/


John K Clark
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