[ExI] Smalley vs. Drexler & 3 Dimensions

[natasha at natasha.cc]

Excellent!  Thanks John.

 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 9:27 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Smalley vs. Drexler & 3 Dimensions

 

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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