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Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy 144

Posted by michael from the lead-from-gold dept.
Anonymous Kamath writes "IEEE Spectrum recently published an interview with aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy who's just written his first non-fiction book "Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms" proposing the application of quantum dot technology on a large scale thereby allowing one to control properties of materials at will. Another science fiction author laid down the principles of geostationary satellite communication half a century ago."
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Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy More

Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy

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  • Members Only?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by stungod ( 137601 ) <scott@@@globalspynetwork...com> on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:13PM (#5894533) Journal
    I'm not an IEEE member...does that mean I can't read the interview?

    Crap!

  • A good read..... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by lexsco ( 594799 )
    .... if you can sign in !!

  • Yeah, and... (Score:3, Funny)

    by sinergy ( 88242 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:13PM (#5894539) Homepage
    Yeah, and science fiction authors also wrote about flying cars. For a while. I don't see them. Where are my flying cars!?!?!?!

    • Re:Yeah, and... (Score:4, Funny)

      by sjanich ( 431789 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:19PM (#5894603)
      I am for one, ok with the lack of flying cars. Drivers seem to have enough problems in 2D.
    • I saw one sunday [keels-wheels.com]!

      OK... it was the 1956 Aerocar [aerocar.com]. But the owner has great plans if you can afford a Lotus Elise! It was suppossed to fly, but was way too breezy so I was screwed. Bah!

      Not quite what Doc Brown brought back....

    • we have flying cars. You can only fly from and park in designated facilities, though. You can have the propeller kind, or the jet engine kind. They are made by many major companies including Cessna, Lockheed, Boeing, etc.
    • It's the year 2000. But where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars. I don't see any flying cars. Why? Why? Why? Because millions of people all over the world can work together on the Web, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You don't need flying cars. But you will need a different kind of software.
    • I just got an upgrade from NVIDIA, and it seems to fix the problem.

  • Program... Aol? (Score:3, Funny)

    by zzxc ( 635106 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:15PM (#5894563)
    Finally! We can reuse all those AOL cds by programming the actual material of the "dots" to reflect light as a "1" or "0".

  • hee hee (Score:3, Funny)

    by archeopterix ( 594938 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:19PM (#5894612) Journal
    ...proposing the application of quantum dot technology...
    Hm... for some reason I've read "quantum dot com technology".
    • Too late. You can already examine many aspects of everyday life as quantum waveforms, with further data (e.g. observation) acting to (partially) collapse the function. Therefore, we've already seen quantum dot coms -- the tech bubble got invested in -- more literally, observed -- and then proceeded to collapse.
    • Makes sense... For most dot coms 'profitable' was an indeterminate state.

  • Radioactive (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great! Now we can patent the process of making internet-enabled software radioactive by means of programming. This way, people will stay away from radioactive Microsoft programs and use Linux! Perfect!

  • Wil Mccarthy's web site (Score:5, Informative)

    by ih8apple ( 607271 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:22PM (#5894638)
    Wil Mccarthy's web site [wilmccarthy.com]

    Tons of interesting info...

  • Rebadge required (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:22PM (#5894639)
    The editors seem to have realised nobody actually reads the articles anymore, posters just write whatever springs to mind. So far today we had the earlier $95 dollar Gartner report and now members only access to the article.

    Are we seeing the birth of a new site, SlashGossip, made up stuff for nerds to post shit about??

    • Re:Rebadge required (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I thought Taco claimed "nobody reads the comments"?!!

      Looks like nobody reads the articles! (As anyone that's read with a threashold below 1 knows all too well!)

      I guess /. corporate policy is to now just post incindiary blurbs for the trolls to bitch about.

      I approve!

    • "Are we seeing the birth of a new site, SlashGossip, made up stuff for nerds to post shit about?? "

      Yes, except it'll be called Slashfire. Just for to keep it interesting a new rule will go into place: Once you use the phrase "but it's a convicted monopoly!" you automatically lose. The fights are short, but brutal.
  • That man is amazing! He's predicted many many things.. In addition to the GPS satellites, he's predicted life on europa (currently a theory), diamonds at the cores of large gaseous planets (also a viable theory), etc..

    Sci Fi authors have been pretty successful in predicting emerging trends in science better than most researchers. Gene Roddenberry anyone?

    • Stanislaw Lew.

    • Re:Arthur C. Clarke (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, and a broken clock is right twice a day. Given how many SF authors there are, it is inevitable that some of them will make guesses that turn out to be reasonable facsimiles of the future.

    • And again I reiterate... (Score:5, Informative)

      by krysith ( 648105 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:34PM (#5894771) Journal
      From an earlier post:

      "It should be noted that Tsiolkovsky was talking about geosynchronous orbits around 1900, and radio engineer George O. Smith wrote about communication satellites in "QRM Interplanetary" in 1942. However, Smith's communication satellites/stations were generally placed at Trojan points in order to give line-of-sight between planets around the sun (hence the name of the novel/story collection "Venus Equilateral"). Of course, no one made a movie of one of Smith's books, so everyone forgets him..."

      I have nothing against Arthur C. Clarke, but credit should go where it is due. And when life on Europa or diamonds on Jupiter are discovered, THEN it will be a prediction. Until then, it's called "speculation".
      • In Venus Equilateral they used giant vacuum tubes for their radios, and had no computers to speak of. The second part of the collection is about them finding new uses for the vacuum tubes such as reactionless drives and matter transmitters. A perfect example of the SF tendancy towards "When you have a hammer..."

        Plus it never seemed to occur to Smith that, in space, they didn't need the 'tubes'...

        • Plus it never seemed to occur to Smith that, in space, they didn't need the 'tubes'...

          Is space a hard-enough vacuum for that kind of use? Especially in LEO, isn't there still considerably more gas bouncing around per unit volume than in any halfway-decent vacuum tube? Tubes tend to not work too well when they get gassy (whether through a leak or shoddy manufacture)...what are the odds this would be a problem if you just stuck a cathode/grid/plate combination outside the nearest airlock and fired it up

          • Venus Equilateral was set in a space station of the same name located on a trojan point for Venus (thus the name). Pretty hard vacuum there.

            Another problem with the science, but one I would give Smith a pass on considering the time it was written, is that the libration points for the inner planets are not supposed to be very stable. OTOH, they would be stable enough if you were willing to correct once in a while.
        • Yes, true, but then, we hadn't invented transistors yet in 1942. If Smith had anticipated ~those~, I think that more people would know who he was. I actually really liked the matter transmitter/duplicator stories. He was one of the first (to my knowledge) sci-fi writers to address the effects of a "replicator"-type technology on an economy. He suggested that only "unique" items: original works of art, non-reproduced items, etc. would have value in such an economy. I don't know if "hand-made" objects co
      • And when life on Europa or diamonds on Jupiter are discovered, THEN it will be a prediction. Until then, it's called "speculation".

        I agree it's speculation not prediction. But speculation doesn't (shouldn't?) retrospectively change to prediction once found to be true.

      • A few points to make - you both miss the point. Yes Tsiolkovsky spoke of geosynchronous orbits, but his interest was primarily space elevators, his satellites were to be used as counterweights. Any other use was secondary. Also he wasn't an sf author, he was literally a rocket scientist, he was brilliant and the world of rocketry owes him a great debt. He wasn't making predictions, he was proposing a means of accomplishing these ends.

        Smiths' satellites were part of his novels and he did not write a technic
    • Clarke predicted geostationery satellites, not GPS.

  • Uhh.. (Score:1, Redundant)

    by mewsenews ( 251487 )
    I'm glad all the IEEE members will be able to read this interview. Fantastic.

  • I've just finished reading this book and... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikerackhabit ( 442545 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:23PM (#5894645)
    It's quite interesting. McCarthy tells a good story, and in the tradition of good science writing, introduces us to the interesting cast of characters that is working on this stuff.

    That said, the book has more of a 'fiction' and less of a 'science' feel to it overall. This is a science in its very early stages and much of the theorizing McCarthy does comes off more as wishful thinking than anything that the data backs up. To his credit, McCarthy points this out and tries to be careful to let you know what's fact and what's speculation.

    Overall it's a pretty interesting book though. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys popular-science writing (in the vain of Gleick or Greene) and doesn't mind a little wild speculation thrown in.

    For those of you who are interested in the applications for computing, he talks a very little bit about the possibilities in quantum computing that this opens up, but he actually explicitly states that he's not particularly interested in it. As such, most of the book is about matter that can change it's chemical properties and the more material science applications for it.

    Ohh, and the last section of the book (actually and appendix) is all about the patent he filed for a device he came up with over the course of writing the book called a quantum well. It makes me a little nervous when someone's already trying to patent stuff that isn't realizable for years and years. Not a call to arms, but something to think about.
    • ... becomes 'wish' ... ta-dah! ... observable phenomenon, becomes empirical, done.

      Or what?
    • The patent isn't for a quantum well, it's for a "wellstone fiber", which would allow you to actually make bulk programmable matter using quantum wells -- which are currently limited to surface films.

    • Ohh, and the last section of the book (actually and appendix) is all about the patent he filed for a device he came up with over the course of writing the book called a quantum well. It makes me a little nervous when someone's already trying to patent stuff that isn't realizable for years and years. Not a call to arms, but something to think about.

      Well if it's years off, the patent will have expired by then - and the Patent Office will have no choice but see the prior art when somebody gets around t

      • Well if it's years off, the patent will have expired by then - and the Patent Office will have no choice but see the prior art when somebody gets around to trying to patent it again.

        That is only true if the practical applications are at least 20 years after the date of filing, something that you cannot be certain of (though the well documented chilling effects of patents on innovation would lead one to expect that this might indeed become the case, as a direct result of the issuence of this patent).

        It is
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • One of the requirements for a valid patent is that the patent must disclose sufficient information so that someone well-versed in the "prior art" can actually construct the device.

      If the device he has patented can't be constructed yet, the patent is invalid, since it's obvious that he hasn't disclosed sufficient information to allow it to be constructed.

      Someone can try to patent stuff that isn't realizable for years and years, but they don't end up with a valid patent. This is one of the (few) patent regu

  • Login/Password foir Article (Score:5, Informative)

    by nherc ( 530930 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:24PM (#5894657) Journal
    When prompted use:

    registration/sucks

    Really, I registered a free account with this combo.

  • Oh yawn (Score:3, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:24PM (#5894667) Homepage Journal

    Programmable matter has been around for years, just look at the T-1000 Terminator [imdb.com]

  • Article (Score:5, Informative)

    by boulat ( 216724 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:26PM (#5894695)
    The New Alchemy
    Could semiconductor technology do for material science what it has for computing?

    Imagine a solid wall that, as the occasion demands, becomes completely transparent or transforms on one side into a giant video screen while the other side becomes either a solar panel or a heat pump that cools a room on a hot day. This is the promise of programmable matter--and it could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.

    The idea of programmable matter began to seep into the popular consciousness in recent years through the works of aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy [right], who dubbed the new material wellstone in novels like The Collapsium (Del Rey, 2000). Now McCarthy has written his first nonfiction book about programmable matter, Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked to him about this bleeding-edge technology and how McCarthy himself is helping to transform science fiction into science fact.

    What is programmable matter?
    Programmable matter is fundamentally a solid-state technology--something that can change its optical, physical, magnetic, or electrical behavior without any moving parts except for electrons or photons. In that sense, there are certain things now that already qualify as programmable matter, like an LCD [liquid-crystal display] screen. This is an assembly of devices, but you can also look at it as carefully arranged material that has the interesting property of changing color under electrical stimulation. By adjusting quantum dots instead of pixels, you can make artificial atoms and adjust a lot more than just the color of the material.

    What are quantum dots and how do you use them to make artificial atoms?
    A natural atom is a particular means for confining electrons--the positively charged nucleus gathers electrons around it and doesn't let them escape. By confining the electrons, you force them to behave as standing waves. And those standing waves are responsible for nearly all the chemical, electrical, and optical properties that we associate with atoms.

    But you don't have to have an atomic nucleus to get that sort of behavior out of electrons; you just have to confine them in a small space. There are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to use the standard techniques of semiconductor chip design to create junctions that will herd electrons into an area of choice, known as a quantum dot. Once confined, the electrons will form a structure known as an artificial atom. With artificial atoms, unlike natural atoms, there is no reason why you can't pump electrons in and out and change their characteristics dynamically, making them programmable.

    But if these programmable atoms are buried in a semiconductor substrate, how do they interact with anything? How do you make the entire material behave like it's made out of, say, gold?
    With programmable atoms in a substrate, what you are really doing is creating controlled impurities--dopant atoms--so the properties of your semiconductors are going to be very important in determining the final properties of the programmable substance. You can get a very high level of doping with a properly designed quantum dot array and overwhelm the normal behavior of the semiconductor. You can never ignore the fact that the semiconductor is there, but you can change its properties almost beyond recognition.

    So would you have to combine different types of artificial atoms to end up with a material whose net behavior is like that of gold?
    Probably. An artificial atom of gold-- pseudo-gold--is almost certainly going to be a lot larger than an atom of natural gold. One consequence of this is that its absorption and reflection spectrum will be redshifted, because the electrons are less tightly bound so they will be at lower energies. So even if you could somehow have atoms of pseudo-gold without any substrate, they'd be
    • "You wouldn't be able to, say, chemically dissociate water atoms..."

      Huh!? Water atoms?
      Can you make wind atoms from this stuff as well? How about fire atoms, wouldn't that be something?

  • What the? (Score:5, Funny)

    by helix400 ( 558178 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:27PM (#5894698) Journal
    from the lead-from-gold dept.

    Lead from gold? Don't you mean the other way around? Unless, of course, this is Slashdot's newest money making strategy....

    1) Buy lots of gold
    2) Turn it into lead
    3) ????
    4) Profit!
  • why they won't even let you see the site if you don't accept their cookies....
  • It sounds like T2 is made of quantum dots!

    PS:
    A long long time ago I read a sci-fi story, perhaps called "Spiro" or something similar, that was very similar to T2. Instead of from the future, the shape shifter was from another planet. In the end the protagonist said "One thing I know is where-ever it comes from, they don't have birds. If he though of changing into a bird he could have FLOWN out of danger!"

  • Content post (Score:5, Informative)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves ( 236787 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:33PM (#5894764)
    The New Alchemy

    Could semiconductor technology do for material science what it has for computing?

    Imagine a solid wall that, as the occasion demands, becomes completely transparent or transforms on one side into a giant video screen while the other side becomes either a solar panel or a heat pump that cools a room on a hot day. This is the promise of programmable matter--and it could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.

    The idea of programmable matter began to seep into the popular consciousness in recent years through the works of aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy [right], who dubbed the new material wellstone in novels like The Collapsium (Del Rey, 2000). Now McCarthy has written his first nonfiction book about programmable matter, Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked to him about this bleeding-edge technology and how McCarthy himself is helping to transform science fiction into science fact.

    What is programmable matter?
    Programmable matter is fundamentally a solid-state technology--something that can change its optical, physical, magnetic, or electrical behavior without any moving parts except for electrons or photons. In that sense, there are certain things now that already qualify as programmable matter, like an LCD [liquid-crystal display] screen. This is an assembly of devices, but you can also look at it as carefully arranged material that has the interesting property of changing color under electrical stimulation. By adjusting quantum dots instead of pixels, you can make artificial atoms and adjust a lot more than just the color of the material.

    What are quantum dots and how do you use them to make artificial atoms?
    A natural atom is a particular means for confining electrons--the positively charged nucleus gathers electrons around it and doesn't let them escape. By confining the electrons, you force them to behave as standing waves. And those standing waves are responsible for nearly all the chemical, electrical, and optical properties that we associate with atoms.

    But you don't have to have an atomic nucleus to get that sort of behavior out of electrons; you just have to confine them in a small space. There are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to use the standard techniques of semiconductor chip design to create junctions that will herd electrons into an area of choice, known as a quantum dot. Once confined, the electrons will form a structure known as an artificial atom. With artificial atoms, unlike natural atoms, there is no reason why you can't pump electrons in and out and change their characteristics dynamically, making them programmable.

    But if these programmable atoms are buried in a semiconductor substrate, how do they interact with anything? How do you make the entire material behave like it's made out of, say, gold?
    With programmable atoms in a substrate, what you are really doing is creating controlled impurities--dopant atoms--so the properties of your semiconductors are going to be very important in determining the final properties of the programmable substance. You can get a very high level of doping with a properly designed quantum dot array and overwhelm the normal behavior of the semiconductor. You can never ignore the fact that the semiconductor is there, but you can change its properties almost beyond recognition.

    So would you have to combine different types of artificial atoms to end up with a material whose net behavior is like that of gold?
    Probably. An artificial atom of gold-- pseudo-gold--is almost certainly going to be a lot larger than an atom of natural gold. One consequence of this is that its absorption and reflection spectrum will be redshifted, because the electrons are less tightly bound so they will be at lower energies. So even if you could somehow have atoms of pseudo-gold without any substrate,

  • Link (No Registration) (Score:5, Informative)

    by criggs ( 107755 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:33PM (#5894766)
    http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/apr0 3/book.html [ieee.org]
    ok... I got it from some search engine...

  • Origin of "programmable matter" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:36PM (#5894795)
    I am actually Jonathan Vos Post, former Professor of Astronomy, Active Member of Science Fiction Writers of America, and software geek for 37 years (since 1966). I am extremely impressed by both the fiction and nonfiction on this subject by Wil McCarthy.

    It happens that, as a side-effect of my writing perhaps the first Nanotechnology Ph.D. dissertation ("Molecular Cybernetics", 1977), I coined the terms of "programmable matter" and of "smart matter" by 1980. I used these terms in discussions I had with CS Professor/Science Fiction author Vernor Vinge, when the vingemiester was writing "Fire Upon the Deep."

    I'm delighted that Wil McCarthy has taken the subject further, in his article in "Analog", his IEEE publication, and his wonderful novels.

    He's such a good "hard Science Fiction" author that I feel a serious twinge of jealousy when I read him, same as I do for Sir Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, Greg Benford, and a handfull of others.

    Go you: read, and be enlightened.

    Jonathan Vos Post
    magicdragon.com
    over 10,000,000 hits in 2002 alone

  • Pron spam is gonna be fun when this happens!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dutchmaan ( 442553 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:40PM (#5894839) Homepage
    proposing the application of quantum dot technology on a large scale thereby allowing one to control properties of materials at will.

    Imagine the pornographic possibilities!
  • Greg Bear has had an idea along these lines,
    in his book "Moving Mars".

    • No, Greg Bear's idea from Moving Mars was not the same as the idea as McCarthy is talking about. In Bear's work, the concept was that all atoms had certain variables that described them and that those variables (including location relative to the rest of the universe) could be altered.

      If you'd take the time to read the article, what McCarthy is writing about is a quantum dot -- a atom-sized well that can have particles pumped into it, specifically, electrons. Drop in three electrons, and they'll take up
  • Is it just me or does that name sound untrustworthy...... i mean remember McCarthyism from the Korean war, where he blacklisted everyone as communists... I'm not too sure if I'de believe his work right away lol. But anyways, nice book, after I get through War and Peace I might get to it....

  • Some useful info... (Score:5, Informative)

    by LamerX ( 164968 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @03:50PM (#5894941) Journal
    Thought you guys might find this interesting as well, since the page is gone....

    http://pm.bu.edu/

    http://www.wilmccarthy.com/pmfaq.htm

    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/atoms.ht ml

  • Arthur C. Clarke was NOT the first person to propose relay satellites. He adapted the idea of a geosynchronous satellite from an older story by an obscure SF author whose name escapes me now. The author wrote a story describing a relay station put up on an asteroid to act as a bridge between Earth and Venusian colonies when the sun was in the middle. Essentially, the same concept Clarke used.
    • . . . I think. The book might have been _Venus Equilateral_.

      A very elderly Smith attended one of the first SF conventions I went to. What I best remember about the con was the shameful way a young snot of a fan treated him when he was given an honorary spot on a panel.

    • Re:Actually... It wasn't Clarke (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually... it was.

      The stories you're thinking of were all part of George O. Smith's [i]Venus Equilateral[/i] series written in the 40's and 50's. He describes a radio relay station in Venus's orbit, 60% off from the planet (ahead or behind - I don't remember), so it will be visible from both Earth and Venus when they are on opposite sides of the Sun. This orbit is the equivent of the L4 and L5 orbits in the Earth-Moon system.

      What Clarke proposed was that a radio relay satellite in a 24 hour orbit around

  • Speaking of lead to gold... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tyler Durden ( 136036 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @04:02PM (#5895053)
    I was reading some discussion board a while ago when someone with a physics background claimed that it actually was possible to change lead to gold. All you had to do was take a thin strip of lead and bombard it with beta radiation for a while. He said it wasn't practical enough to make a profit out of, but it was possible.

    Can anyone here confirm or deny this?

    • Re:Speaking of lead to gold... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jamesc ( 37895 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @04:52PM (#5895490)
      I was reading some discussion board a while ago when someone with a physics background claimed that it actually was possible to change lead to gold. All you had to do was take a thin strip of lead and bombard it with beta radiation for a while. He said it wasn't practical enough to make a profit out of, but it was possible.

      Can anyone here confirm or deny this?

      Hmmm.... Lead has an atomic number of 82, gold is 79. Beta radiation (really fast electrons) isn't generally used for transmutations. I suppose you could knock off some protons or neutrons off the lead nucleus with it, but it's not a good choice. If you're going to use classic transmutation, be aware that most of lead's radioisotopes decay via Electron Capture to Thallium or beta radiation to Bismuth.

      A better choice would be to bombard 196Hg (mercury) with neutrons. That will decay via Electron Capture to 196Au (gold) with a half-life of 2.672 days. The catch? 196Hg is only 0.15% of naturally occuring mercury. You'd need to make a lot of neutrons, and would end up with very little gold amongst a stew of other isotopes, radioactive and stable.

      • I think it's alpha, not beta.. it's been a while since high school chem/physics, and I'm still on a waitlist for Uncle Sam to train me on nuclear physics...
        The problem is twofold:
        1) The process is much more expensive than the street value of gold
        2) Even if it were cheaper, it's an unstable (radioactive) isotope of gold that wouldn't be especially useful.

      • Re:Speaking of lead to gold... (Score:4, Informative)

        by dragonsister ( 321121 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2003 @02:13AM (#5899125) Homepage
        The stable isotope of gold is 197Au anyway! (Mass 197, atomic number 79, note the re-use of digits; I use this often in my data files.)

        There are several stable lead isotopes, so I'm sure someone can come up with a pair of reactions that turn one of those isotopes into 197Au, although getting rid of three protons is decidedly inconvenient - far harder than getting rid of two or four. But you'd probably lose most of the lead to other reactions, and it would indeed be a ridiculous waste of money. Gold is cheap.

        Yes, I mean that. It's all relative, of course. That gold is expensive is 'common knowledge'. Still, many people realise that platinum and iridium are more expensive. Some fraction of them realise the value of other rare, useful elements - such as tantalum [newscientist.com].

        What's really expensive is isotopically enriched or pure material. (Weapons-grade uranium is a (cheap) example of an enriched material.) Such as the 196Hg that the previous poster mentioned. My PhD work required 176Lu, which we purchased 4 milligrams of stuff enriched to 50%, at about US$1600 per milligram (From memory of four years ago.) It's not the most expensive out there, either ... What price does Gold fetch per ounce (30 grams?) There is only one isotope of gold, and it's relatively easy to chemically purify, and relatively common on the earth's crust. We make targets of it all the time - it's great for calibrations - the lab occasionally sends visitors home with a few cents worth of gold foil on their thumbnails.

        Possibly the most valuable batch of nuclei in the world is a target made of the 16+ isomeric form of 178Hf - a truly microscopic quantity of material made by herculean effort at a big laboratory. The enrichment is something tiny like 3%.

        Other materials that make gold look cheap are things like carbon nanotubes. Bucky-balls extended into pipes. There have been massive improvements in manufacturing processes - I think the cost of bucky-tubes is now comparable with that 176Lutetium I was talking about. As for the programmable materials the article refers to - they're going to start out vastly more expensive still, and it'll take a long time before the cost drops to near modern silicon technology - and you don't build your walls from RAM, do you? Don't expect to replace bricks with programmable materials, at least in your lifetime. Be impressed if artificial-atom materials get cheap enough to be used in common consumer goods.

        Rachel

  • Where can I get this as an E-book I can read on my Zaurus?

    *sigh*
  • The crazy weaponry in Anvil of the Stars [gregbear.com], by Greg Bear. Been a while since I read it, but as I recall, the crew of this ship discovered how to "edit" matter, and used this offensively against the aliens who destroyed Earth.

  • Silicon! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by voodoo1man ( 594237 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @04:18PM (#5895207)
    "Similarly, silicon is actually a pretty tough material. Particularly in compression, it's inherently a lot stronger than some of the normal building materials we use today. If you can generate artificial atoms with the right magnetic properties, you could keep silicon under compression and make it stronger in tension."
    Given that silicon is the second most abundant element on Earth, this is very interesting indeed. Something like this material would be perfect for building superstructures, such as arcologies. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the only thing we need now is flying cars, and it's Blade Runner time!
  • Darn, I knew I should have kept paying the enormous fee each year for something...

    Though I do miss the monthly publications like the Photonics journal...

    Though OT, how would one join back up if you dropped out 10 years ago? It took
    a recommendation from another member to qualify back then..

  • nanotech (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MikeFM ( 12491 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @04:51PM (#5895479) Homepage Journal
    The first time I heard of this was along with nanotechnology and the twins have haunted my view of the future since. The current battle about genetics looks like kids stuff when you compare it to nanotechnology and programmable matter. Imagine if you could create an implant that'd let you manipulate individual atoms and add in your own quasi-atoms. It'd be especially cool if you could hack your own body with that technology. It makes most of our concepts of magic sound like nothing at all. :)
  • This is really cool, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. Most large scale materials engineering processes are still done using basic manufacturing techniques, from forging to sintering to pre-preg tape for composites. Manipulating matter at the quantum scale is way, way down the road. The main problem is there isn't really an engineering branch that connects the materials engineers to the theoretical physicists. They're kind of two different sides of the same coin. And forget about talking to th

  • Replicating the substrate, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by clambake ( 37702 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2003 @02:21AM (#5899147) Homepage
    One of the things he talks about is how the virtual atoms can only exist right on top of the silicon substrate... Why can't the "atoms" that you are creating resemble more silicon substrate, complete with wires and all that it needs to function, and then sitting on top of that is yeat another virtual layer, ad nauseum until you create wahtever you want. All you would need is a little chip of "seed" substrate and you could "replicate" stuff... It wouldn't exist as soon as the power shuts off, but it would seem to exist until that point, right? So pseudo replication.

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