
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 - dnetesn
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2016/popular-chemistryprize2016.pdf
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nojvek
I am reaching Feynman's "pleasure of finding things out". Gotta say his
nanotechnology lecture was ver inspiring. I'm glad we've made much progress on
it. I hope this ends up creating tiny super bots some day. The kind surgeons
can "hangout" inside a body and perform a delicate surgery.

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M_Grey
That was a great read, so many different kind of small "machines"! I think for
the first time I feel hopeful about the relatively "near" future (next 50
years) of nanotech.

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dnautics
They're not really machines, as a machine is defined as a contraption that
converts one form of energy to another (e.g. a lever), these are just
molecules that look like machines but have no handles with which to use as the
analogous machine.

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zardo
Converting UV light into rotary motion doesn't count?

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M_Grey
It definitely does, by any reasonable definition of "machinery", which is why
"cellular machinery" is a term in fact.

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ktamiola
I am super proud as I had lectures with Ben at University of Groningen whilst
doing master and PhD courses. Super cool guy, straight to the point.

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kobeya
What about Drexler, Merkle and Freitas?

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westoncb
I wonder if software could assist progress here.

Anyone know if tools exist for modeling chemical behavior _on a level that
would be useful for simulating the assembly of 'machines' like in the
article?_

I see these researchers are jumping up a level of abstraction, thinking in
terms of new primitives (e.g. 'rotaxanes')—maybe the software could begin its
modeling in terms of rules obeyed by these new primitives (rather than
starting from quantum mechanics or whatever).

Edit: added italics.

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genericpseudo
Computational chemistry (and/or computational solid state physics) is a field
with 50+ years of history and a ton of exceptionally active research groups.

Your most likely starting point is density functional theory;
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_functional_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_functional_theory),
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohn–Sham_equations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohn–Sham_equations).
Classical molecular mechanics is even older than that.

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westoncb
Thanks! The article on density functional theory is very interesting so far.

Any idea on the second part of my question, though? Whether it might be
possible to explicitly model the behavior of these higher-level constructs,
e.g. modeling catenane interactions rather than molecular interactions.

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rsfern
what you're describing is essentially what people try to do with molecular
dynamics and kinetic Monte Carlo methods, which are even older methods than
density functional theory. There's currently a lot of interest in the
materials community in developing ways to link these abstractions -- often
highly abstracted models just aren't good enough for quantitative results,
because they are difficult to parameterize, or they abstract away important
physics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiscale_modeling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiscale_modeling)

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westoncb
Perfect! That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking. Sounds like the
different scales aren't really 'sealed off' as much as I was hoping, though,
and that underlying details are still critical to doing actual work in the
field :/ Ah, well.

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coldcode
Fascinating work. Now I wish I had continued on my PhD in chemistry 35 years
ago. Oh well... this field would have been close to what I would have worked
on, or at least enough that it might have attracted me. Building things no one
else ever built is pretty inspiring.

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dekhn
Great stuff. Sadly, we're still a really far away from Drexler's vision of
nanotechnology.

