41–50 of 62 posts
I don't see any definition by which MEMS sensors are not 'micromachines'.
> We don’t even have micromachines. Mechanical objects on microscales do not exist. Huh? Aren’t micromirror devices made of millions of microscale mechanical objects? The first DMD page that came up for me is a TI DLP4500, which has about an 11mm diagonal and is about 1000 mirrors wide, putting the individual mirrors, and their tiny hinges at around 10 microns. What definition of “microscale” is the author using? Edi…
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_syste...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is a weird argument and unnecessary for the main target of the article. There were plenty of successful microactuators, sensors, full microrobots, etc even when this article was written (2010).
Yeah, I agree that it’s tangential to the main point. Still, it makes me question the author’s credibility on the subject. If you’re claiming something won’t exist, and you’re overlooking a large amount of technology that does exist, I can’t help but think that you might have overlooked something in your assessment of the state of the art.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is a weird argument and unnecessary for the main target of the article. There were plenty of successful microactuators, sensors, full microrobots, etc even when this article was written (2010).
Yeah, I agree that it’s tangential to the main point. Still, it makes me question the author’s credibility on the subject. If you’re claiming something won’t exist, and you’re overlooking a large amount of technology that does exist, I can’t help but think that you might have overlooked something in your assessment of the state of the art.
You can, of course, suppose that the author has overlooked something, but there are others who have equally - and perhaps more carefully, by your standard - made the same points, such as Richard Smalley, who is quoted here.
> We don’t even have micromachines. Mechanical objects on microscales do not exist. Huh? Aren’t micromirror devices made of millions of microscale mechanical objects? The first DMD page that came up for me is a TI DLP4500, which has about an 11mm diagonal and is about 1000 mirrors wide, putting the individual mirrors, and their tiny hinges at around 10 microns. What definition of “microscale” is the author using? Edi…
MEMS [1] is, I believe, the name you're looking for. Lots of cool detail on the Wiki page. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_syste...
> Really “material science” was a sort of fancy label for the chemistry of things we use to build other things. Wrong, much of what material scientists do relate to the physical properties of the materials. I know a few material scientists, and while they do have a small part of the lab that looks pretty much like a chemistry lab, most of their methods and goals differ from what happens in a typical chemistry lab.
It's still a long way from drexlerian nanotech, but being unable to controllably form covalent bonds through positioning was one of the big arguments against drexlerian nanotech.
I don't presume anyone would call out Feynmann for not knowing his physics. He even won a nobel prize for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_th...
If I could do it over, I would stay away. The subject matter was fascinating, but was also a discontinuous hodgepodge of nano-related topics from physics, chemistry, and biology.
Things may become more organized as the program matures, but looking back it felt more like a 4 year exploratory to prep for grad school than a Bachelor of Science degree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that a counterargument to Drexlerism? The fact that it already exists would seem to make it more likely that human engineering will leverage it.
Yeah but the human engineering you are looking for is mostly called biotech. I think the argument is that there just isn’t a novel field here. Drexler tried to carve one out where none exists to make himself and his followers look like they invented something when they did not. Nanotech is really just gloss on biology, materials engineering, or chemistry, all of which are well aware of quantum scale effects and use t…
Drexler specifically wanted assemblers that could work with aluminum and that could do some extra stuff with carbon that biology can't do.