I received an e-mail
invitation from Chris Peterson at the Foresight Institute in early April to attend the Society of
Manufacturing Engineers Nanotechnology and Microtechnology conference that
month in Mesa, Arizona. The generous offer was too sweet to pass up: attend the
conference, write a blog, and my registration fees would be waived. I jumped at
the chance.
Here I offer my
reflections on some of the highlights of the presentation by Dr. J. Storrs
Hall of the Foresight Institute, entitled "Feynman's Pathway
to Nanomanufacturing," and the panel discussion that followed, “How Do We
Get There from Here?” Discussions such
as these are crucial opportunities to reflect on – and potentially shape –
emerging technologies whose destinies are often left to be determined by
“market forces.” Keep in mind that the
conference attendees were mostly nanomanufacturing engineers who work and think
at the forefront - and beyond - of emerging nanoscience
and technology.
Dr. Hall began with an
intriguing argument: Feynman's top-down approach to reaching the nano scale in
manufacturing, achieved through a step-down method of replicating and
miniaturizing an entire, fully-equipped machine shop in 1:4 scale over and over
would yield countless benefits to science, engineering, and manufacturing at
each step.
These microscopic,
tele-manipulated master-slave “Waldos” (named after Heinlein's 1942 story Waldo)
would get nanotechnology back on track by focusing on machines and
manufacturing, since most of our current emphasis is on science at the nano
scale. Feynman's top-down approach to
nanoscale manufacturing is missing from the Foresight Institute's roadmap,
according to Hall, “for political reasons.” This raises a fundamental point:
science and technology cannot develop independent of the political and social
spheres, which pose as many challenges as the technology. Many would argue that social and
technological processes are inseparable and treating them otherwise borders on
folly. I commend Dr. Hall for offering
his argument. It soon became clear that
the panelists who joined him after his presentation disagreed.
Technoscientific
development is difficult to direct and nearly impossible to predict. Because of this - not in spite of it – panel
discussions like "How Do We Get There From Here?" are crucial: they
allow us to speculate, imagine, and contest claims and predictions about
emerging technologies. However, planning
and debating are only part of the picture.
As Dr. Hall aptly noted it's not dispassionate calculations but “serendipity:
the way science always works.”
On the panel, Tihamer
Toth-Fejel (from General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems) countered Hall
by arguing that no funding exists for the incremental steps proposed by Feynman
and the knowledge or potential products and processes gained from each stage
would not be sufficient to finance the next step down. He took the decidedly “engineer” approach to
problem-solving as the driving factor toward the nano scale and argued that we
should try to accomplish the goal of nanoscale manufacturing by traversing the
shortest distance between top-down and bottom-up. He argued that we must be able to demonstrate
to investors that we can accomplish an 18-month payoff if we are to have any
hope of funding this adventure. Joining
the debate, David Keenan (Small Technology Consulting, who had, earlier that
morning, given an overview of recent or imminent market breakthroughs in
nanotechnology in his presentation) made a cogent argument for the need to
restructure our current pedagogical approaches toward educating future
engineers if we are to tackle the “hurdles, bottlenecks, and next generation of
cross-disciplinary challenges” around nano.
This tack is especially salient if we are to shape the way we think
about approaching engineering at the nano scale.
One provocative statement
by Dr. Hall during his earlier talk was, “If we would have taken Feynman's
advice back then, we'd have nanobots today.”
This is akin to stating that, in my humble view, had we followed
Feynman's advice we'd have the contents of the Library of Congress written on
the back of a postage stamp. Both might
be possible but statements like this perplex me: On the one hand they are moot
and on the other, meaningless without a line of additional follow-up
questions. Yes, we are capable of
nanowriting but in 2010, with networked digital computing and e-readers, who
among us would opt for an electron microscope and Feynman's postage stamp library? The problem is we are aiming at a moving
target in a changing landscape.
That said, it can be
valuable (if not necessary) to imagine alternatives and create space for
multiple possibilities as we create new devices, processes, and knowledge. In this light, we could ask "If we had
followed Feynman's advice and accomplished his 'step-down' scaling, how might
we be better and/or worse off than we are today?" Let's discuss.
Note: The views and opinions expressed above
are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for
Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, Arizona State
University, or the National Science Foundation.
The author would like to thank Chris Peterson and the Foresight
Institute for providing him access
