

Drexler: Self-Assembly for Nanotechnology - ph0rque
http://metamodern.com/2009/01/26/self-assembly-for-nanotechnology/

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jfoutz
here's a book he wrote... 18 years ago. there's great stuff in there. how to
build a computer out of rod logic. how get pure sources of elements by
cascading filters... armatures for assembling individual atoms.

[http://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-Molecular-Machinery-
Manufa...](http://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-Molecular-Machinery-
Manufacturing-Computation/dp/0471575186/)

Richard Feynman apparently had recursive ideas, use a lathe to make a tiny
lathe, use the tiny lathe to make a really really tiny lathe... all the way
down.

This is the future... but probably a long way away.

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jerf
The recursive idea is an old one. If it worked we'd have had some sort of
assembly-based nanotechnology decades ago. The problem is that the nature of
matter and mechanics changes as you get small; the world as we know it ceases
to be, and you enter a world where what we macroscopic folk call a "chemical
reaction" becomes a "physical force", where friction is a much larger concern,
and where this strange new van der Waals force makes everything strangely
alternative sticky and slippery in strange and bold new ways.

Unfortunately, we need to build an entirely new engineering discipline for the
small. Which is underway, but takes some time.

