Also, do you think utility fog is doable without a major leap in technology?
Unbelievably far.
The best way I can describe it is we are in the "Stone Age" of nanotech: We've gotten *very good* at making various shapes, like spheres, rods, cubes (WITCHCRAFT), etc on the nanoscale. And these shapes are highly useful just in and of themselves! (Just as stone tools were: Sharp rock, AXE! Smooth rock, SHOVEL!)
We are *just now* getting the hang of combining these shapes in simple ways. Aside from painstaking (And, on an industrial scale, not useful) piece by piece fiddling with an Atomic Force Microscope (You can kind of use it like a tiny crane/pen), There are two methods of mass-producing nanoscale structures: Top down and Bottom Up.
Top down techniques include things like photolithography (for instance: How they make computer chips). This generally involves coating a substance in a material called "photoresist": The photoresist will change when exposed to light (there are two types of photoresist, but that is not really important here. Suffice to say that depending on the type, one type of photo resist will form a polymer with itself when exposed to light, and the other type is normally a polymer and *de*-polymerizes when exposed to light).
Basically, using a mask or other method, you 'draw' a pattern in the photoresist with light, then submerge it in water: the photoresist that's polymerized will stay, the stuff that's not polymerized will be washed away. Then you dip everything in acid and it'll etch everywhere the photo-resist *isn't*, making structures on, potentially, very tiny scales. (There are more refined techniques than this: This is an example!)
This technique has a lot of limits, not the least of which is "Making a substance out of more than one material".
Bottom up is reacting/combining existing nanoparticles into a larger structure. Say, chemically, for instance.
This is *VERY HARD*, because nanoparticles are, in general, inherently unstable. They want to aggregate and drop out of solution: The only ways to really prevent this are to either coat them all in a charged substance so they repel each other, or to coat them in what's called a "Steric Barrier" so they can't glom on to each other (Think Teflon).
So to do bottom-up synthesis, you have to perform some very tricky chemical wizardry (And sometimes use outside sources to arrange the particles, like, say, magnetic fields).
Both of these methods are being worked on (and my thesis is on adding/refining another type of bottom up method-basically adding another 'tool' to the nanotech toolkit).
I'm not sure if 'utility fog' is possible or not. I suspect the energy required would be pretty immense.
It's actually still a fairly young field, which is one of the reasons I'm kind of excited to be in it. It's neat to be near the ground floor!
(Please let me know if you want clarification! I actually really enjoy trying to share science)
Do you think we're closer to programmable simple life (such as the ability to create modable viruses)?
Also, since we're so far off, has there been any thought as to how nanomachines might be powered?
Physics Grad student here! (Which.. I guess means I'm a physicist?), with about 6 months until my PhD (... I hope).
I'm happy to *try* and answer-well, physics questions. I should note that my focus/field is nanotech/nanophysics, though I can try to answer theory questions, too!
If you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, what happens?
An amazing opportunity for FTL clamps?
You were describing nipples, right?
...
Hello?
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LuvTheMonkeyHigh Sierra SerenadeRegistered Userregular
Want your mind broken even more? One of the logical consequences of the invariance of the speed of light is that time moves at different rates for observers in relative motion.
In 1971, two scientists named Joseph Haefele and Richard Keating did some science. They put some atomic clocks on airplanes and flew them around the world (in both east and west directions). The clocks on board the planes, after all was said and done, measured different amounts of time than the reference clocks they left on the ground, and the variations fell within 10% of the predicted variations when using Einstein's relativistic calculations. Further experiments since then have refined that accuracy even closer.
For an every day example, every single GPS receiver and satellite have to include corrections based on Einstein's formulas as part of their geolocation algorithms.
Physics Grad student here! (Which.. I guess means I'm a physicist?), with about 6 months until my PhD (... I hope).
I'm happy to *try* and answer-well, physics questions. I should note that my focus/field is nanotech/nanophysics, though I can try to answer theory questions, too!
If you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, what happens?
An amazing opportunity for FTL clamps?
You were describing nipples, right?
...
Hello?
Hehehe
+4
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
At this point I think practical nano-machines (in the grey goo sense) are more likely to come from biology than any other branch of the sciences because life is already basically the product of millions of different sorts of nanostructures all interacting almost perfectly.
Do you think we're closer to programmable simple life (such as the ability to create modable viruses)?
Depends what you mean by programmable? I mean 99% of "human" insulin sold for diabetic patients is actually made in huge vats full of GM bacteria or yeast. Bacteria even have the massive convenience (for genetic engineers at least) of a sort of secondary DNA, separate from their actual chromosome, in the form of plasmids. These can be removed, mucked about with and put back (and even transferred wholesale between cell lines and even species) all without excessively harming the bacterium. So you could say we already do?
Which is closer to getting me science based magic powers?
Utility fog was my old standby because when considering it's usefulness it's basically magic.
That's probably high-energy particle physics actually. We just need a way to directly affect the fundamental forces without honking great particle accelerators and bam, you got your flying, your conjuration, a bunch of alchemy, vanishing, phasing, invisibility, the works. Except turning inanimate junk into living things, probably. Not even teleporting and time travel are off the list if you can spontaneously generate or dissolve mass….
Which is closer to getting me science based magic powers?
Utility fog was my old standby because when considering it's usefulness it's basically magic.
I'm not up-to-date on what's going on in Biology, but I understand there's some really, *really* exciting advances going on in genetics at the moment.
Though nano is sort if where chemistry, engineering, physics, and bio all sort of ram into each other at high speeds_
Basically, I don't know. Nor am I sure how one would power a nanobot-as we're far enough away from them I'm not sure what they'd really *look* like. It is fun to dream, though! I jut can't give a educated hypothesis-I will think on it a bit more, though.
Also to others, Surface Plasmon Resonance and Time Dialation explanations will have to wait until another day-I do intend to give them! (Iffff folks aren't tired of me spaming the thread with "HEY GUYS HERE IS COOL STUFF I KNOW", that is. )
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
I… think I'm gonna just block the fuck outta c|net now. Who the hell is this "Hawkins" guy they wrote about anyway?
Naturally the comments are indescribably dire. Like sub-YouTube bad.
Engineers are probably the people that actually built the devices used in the double slit experiment. And since I'm just a god fearin' country boy I choose to blame them for revealing the devilry of the photon.
Battletag BYToady#1454
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
Can we also discuss science's richer, sexier brother, ENGINEERING, in this thread?
If we want to talk about applied (almost) nano-tech, I can talk about MEMs for a minute.
MEMs? The fuck are those?
It stands for Micro Electro-Mechanical systems. The "micro" means that most devices operate on the 1-100 micrometer scale (if it were nanometer-scale, it would be NEMs, which are way harder to make and not as much fun to say). Electro-mechanical is a fancy way of saying "doing shit you already understand, but with magnetic and electrical fields instead".
That's great, but who cares?
The easiest MEMs applications to point to are the accelerometers and gyroscopes that seem to be in pretty much everything these days. Other devices include air pressure sensors, biological sensors, DLP chips, etc.
The upsides are that you can make stuff really tiny and really cheap, especially if your design uses silicon. Being able to detect pretty much anything with a chip that costs a few cents (or less) opens up all kinds of applications, from rotating your phone screen to making airbags that deploy if your car is rolling over.
More advanced sensors let you do things in the field that were only possible in the lab before - there are MEMs devices that let you do basic labs on blood or look for contaminated air and water almost instantly. If we ever have something like the Star Trek tricorder, it will come from MEMs (well, NEMs by that point, probably).
The MEMs accelerometer
The accelerometer is probably the simplest of the MEMs devices in concept. This picture shows a pretty basic version of the design:
Basically, you make a bunch of capacitors and then suspend one set of the capacitor plates via some tiny springs (which are their own fairly complex structures at this size) while the other is fixed. What this lets you do is measure the change in capacitance when the plates move with extreme precision - which is good since we're talking about deflections on the order of 10s of nanometers in some cases. To make this part easier and to reduce error, you put thousands of these capacitors on a single chip.
Since you know the mass of your movable plates pretty well from the dimensions and density of the material, you then just have to combine a couple of Physics 1 equations to translate the change in capacitance to the applied acceleration.
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#pipeCocky Stride, Musky odoursPope of Chili TownRegistered Userregular
That's one way. To make pretty much any MEMs device takes 5 basic steps:
1) Deposition - if you're not using silicon, you have to get the material on your substrate. In more complex structures, you'll be adding various sacrificial materials for the etching step here.
2) Patterning - Cover the chip with a negative image of the thing you want to make, using special resistant materials. Basically prep for...
3) Lithography - This can be done with standard UV light, but if you need a finer pattern you can use electron beams or ion beams. The big downside being that they're much slower (read: more expensive) than standard UV. These eat away the parts of the resist that need to go away for the next step.
4) Etching - This can be either a "wet" or "dry" process, depending on the chemicals you use. This is really nasty stuff, like hydroflouric acid or xenon diflouride. Basically you cover the chip in this stuff and it will eat away the exposed parts, leaving you with your structure. If you play your cards right, you can pretty easily have a free-standing structure like a cantilever or the plates from earlier. The science behind this is hideously complex, and I honestly don't remember a lot of it. Has to do with how the crystals are structured and stuff.
Things faster than light; Darkness (not a thing, rather it's absence), the expansion of the universe.
Which you know, seems nonsensical until you remember that we've been able to stare back in time at the visible universe's beginning using telescopes, which should be impossible if we were expanding at less than light speed.
http://www.nautiluslive.org/ is a livestreaming exploratory ROV expedition that is currenty tooling around Conrad Seamount in the Carribean sea, they've had some really amazing encounters
http://www.nautiluslive.org/ is a livestreaming exploratory ROV expedition that is currenty tooling around Conrad Seamount in the Carribean sea, they've had some really amazing encounters
http://www.nautiluslive.org/ is a livestreaming exploratory ROV expedition that is currenty tooling around Conrad Seamount in the Carribean sea, they've had some really amazing encounters
Every time a video of this project surfaces, the engineers and scientists driving the thing sound like just random people pulled off the street.
"OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT
THAT IS SO COOL, JESUS."
It's really adorable.
That's cause they basically are. Scientists are just people who have figured out how to make their weird hobby pay them instead, not some sacred priest-class raised from birth in the One True Way.
We're just trying to figure the world out, yo. Just like everyone else is.
Things faster than light; Darkness (not a thing, rather it's absence), the expansion of the universe.
Which you know, seems nonsensical until you remember that we've been able to stare back in time at the visible universe's beginning using telescopes, which should be impossible if we were expanding at less than light speed.
I seem to remember learning that IN THE BEGINNING the universe was expanding at the speed of light because the light was pushing everything else apart. Is that right or am I crazy/dumb?
http://www.nautiluslive.org/ is a livestreaming exploratory ROV expedition that is currenty tooling around Conrad Seamount in the Carribean sea, they've had some really amazing encounters
Every time a video of this project surfaces, the engineers and scientists driving the thing sound like just random people pulled off the street.
"OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT
THAT IS SO COOL, JESUS."
It's really adorable.
That's cause they basically are. Scientists are just people who have figured out how to make their weird hobby pay them instead, not some sacred priest-class raised from birth in the One True Way.
We're just trying to figure the world out, yo. Just like everyone else is.
More folk need to know that.
Yep! In fact, I've consistently maintained and argued that to be a good scientist, one needs to have a REALLY strong inner five year old.
We're not (for the most part) dour faced men with clip-boards going "Mrhrm yes yes I see. Yes. EXACTLY AS I PREDICTED".
We're the super-hyper five year old that just found a rock with these AWESOME square crystal growing out of it at guys, guys, you totally have to look at this oh man this is AMAZING!
It's the five-year old with a stick poking that REALLY WIERD thing he found on the beach to see what it does.
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FelgrafGraduate School (HELP I'M TRAPPED)Registered Userregular
Things faster than light; Darkness (not a thing, rather it's absence), the expansion of the universe.
Which you know, seems nonsensical until you remember that we've been able to stare back in time at the visible universe's beginning using telescopes, which should be impossible if we were expanding at less than light speed.
I seem to remember learning that IN THE BEGINNING the universe was expanding at the speed of light because the light was pushing everything else apart. Is that right or am I crazy/dumb?
I am not an astrophysicist, but as I remember:
Current cosmology/astrophysicsts suggests that there was a brief period called "The Inflationary Epoch" shortly after the big bang where space/the universe itself expanded MUCH FASTER than the speed of light. And by much faster, I mean increased the size of the universe by a factor of 10^26 in a timespan of around 10^-30 seconds.
Note that this is current theory, however, and while some potential evidence of this was recently found, there confidence in that evidence was unfortunately reduced a bit.
I'm not sure how this concept was arrived at, but I suspect it was simply borne out by the math? This is waaaayyy outside my field, though.
There's some debate, or there was last time I was paying attention. Penrose, for example, is insistent that the necessary mathematical contortions required for inflation to be true are unlikely, or inelegant at least. I actually went to a talk a few years ago where he outlined his own competing theory, which is kind of summarized here
http://www.nautiluslive.org/ is a livestreaming exploratory ROV expedition that is currenty tooling around Conrad Seamount in the Carribean sea, they've had some really amazing encounters
Every time a video of this project surfaces, the engineers and scientists driving the thing sound like just random people pulled off the street.
"OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT
THAT IS SO COOL, JESUS."
It's really adorable.
That's cause they basically are. Scientists are just people who have figured out how to make their weird hobby pay them instead, not some sacred priest-class raised from birth in the One True Way.
We're just trying to figure the world out, yo. Just like everyone else is.
More folk need to know that.
Yep! In fact, I've consistently maintained and argued that to be a good scientist, one needs to have a REALLY strong inner five year old.
We're not (for the most part) dour faced men with clip-boards going "Mrhrm yes yes I see. Yes. EXACTLY AS I PREDICTED".
We're the super-hyper five year old that just found a rock with these AWESOME square crystal growing out of it at guys, guys, you totally have to look at this oh man this is AMAZING!
It's the five-year old with a stick poking that REALLY WIERD thing he found on the beach to see what it does.
The best way I can describe it is we are in the "Stone Age" of nanotech: We've gotten *very good* at making various shapes, like spheres, rods, cubes (WITCHCRAFT), etc on the nanoscale. And these shapes are highly useful just in and of themselves! (Just as stone tools were: Sharp rock, AXE! Smooth rock, SHOVEL!)
A future full of nano-steam-punk tech would be pretty cool.
Basically The Difference Engine on a much, much smaller scale. Tiny tiny watchworks disassembling the world into gray gears.
Posts
Do you think we're closer to programmable simple life (such as the ability to create modable viruses)?
Also, since we're so far off, has there been any thought as to how nanomachines might be powered?
An amazing opportunity for FTL clamps?
You were describing nipples, right?
...
Hello?
Want your mind broken even more? One of the logical consequences of the invariance of the speed of light is that time moves at different rates for observers in relative motion.
In 1971, two scientists named Joseph Haefele and Richard Keating did some science. They put some atomic clocks on airplanes and flew them around the world (in both east and west directions). The clocks on board the planes, after all was said and done, measured different amounts of time than the reference clocks they left on the ground, and the variations fell within 10% of the predicted variations when using Einstein's relativistic calculations. Further experiments since then have refined that accuracy even closer.
For an every day example, every single GPS receiver and satellite have to include corrections based on Einstein's formulas as part of their geolocation algorithms.
Just, go fuck yourself light.
Hehehe
Depends what you mean by programmable? I mean 99% of "human" insulin sold for diabetic patients is actually made in huge vats full of GM bacteria or yeast. Bacteria even have the massive convenience (for genetic engineers at least) of a sort of secondary DNA, separate from their actual chromosome, in the form of plasmids. These can be removed, mucked about with and put back (and even transferred wholesale between cell lines and even species) all without excessively harming the bacterium. So you could say we already do?
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Great, now someone's going to have to clean up this mess
Which is closer to getting me science based magic powers?
Utility fog was my old standby because when considering it's usefulness it's basically magic.
Well hello there.
That's probably high-energy particle physics actually. We just need a way to directly affect the fundamental forces without honking great particle accelerators and bam, you got your flying, your conjuration, a bunch of alchemy, vanishing, phasing, invisibility, the works. Except turning inanimate junk into living things, probably. Not even teleporting and time travel are off the list if you can spontaneously generate or dissolve mass….
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
I'm not up-to-date on what's going on in Biology, but I understand there's some really, *really* exciting advances going on in genetics at the moment.
Though nano is sort if where chemistry, engineering, physics, and bio all sort of ram into each other at high speeds_
Basically, I don't know. Nor am I sure how one would power a nanobot-as we're far enough away from them I'm not sure what they'd really *look* like. It is fun to dream, though! I jut can't give a educated hypothesis-I will think on it a bit more, though.
Also to others, Surface Plasmon Resonance and Time Dialation explanations will have to wait until another day-I do intend to give them! (Iffff folks aren't tired of me spaming the thread with "HEY GUYS HERE IS COOL STUFF I KNOW", that is.
I… think I'm gonna just block the fuck outta c|net now. Who the hell is this "Hawkins" guy they wrote about anyway?
Naturally the comments are indescribably dire. Like sub-YouTube bad.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
No. Engineering is why everything breaks right after the warranty expires.
Fuck those engineers
Whatever enginerd.
Go build the stuff scientists dream up.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
If we want to talk about applied (almost) nano-tech, I can talk about MEMs for a minute.
MEMs? The fuck are those?
It stands for Micro Electro-Mechanical systems. The "micro" means that most devices operate on the 1-100 micrometer scale (if it were nanometer-scale, it would be NEMs, which are way harder to make and not as much fun to say). Electro-mechanical is a fancy way of saying "doing shit you already understand, but with magnetic and electrical fields instead".
That's great, but who cares?
The easiest MEMs applications to point to are the accelerometers and gyroscopes that seem to be in pretty much everything these days. Other devices include air pressure sensors, biological sensors, DLP chips, etc.
The upsides are that you can make stuff really tiny and really cheap, especially if your design uses silicon. Being able to detect pretty much anything with a chip that costs a few cents (or less) opens up all kinds of applications, from rotating your phone screen to making airbags that deploy if your car is rolling over.
More advanced sensors let you do things in the field that were only possible in the lab before - there are MEMs devices that let you do basic labs on blood or look for contaminated air and water almost instantly. If we ever have something like the Star Trek tricorder, it will come from MEMs (well, NEMs by that point, probably).
The MEMs accelerometer
The accelerometer is probably the simplest of the MEMs devices in concept. This picture shows a pretty basic version of the design:
Basically, you make a bunch of capacitors and then suspend one set of the capacitor plates via some tiny springs (which are their own fairly complex structures at this size) while the other is fixed. What this lets you do is measure the change in capacitance when the plates move with extreme precision - which is good since we're talking about deflections on the order of 10s of nanometers in some cases. To make this part easier and to reduce error, you put thousands of these capacitors on a single chip.
Since you know the mass of your movable plates pretty well from the dimensions and density of the material, you then just have to combine a couple of Physics 1 equations to translate the change in capacitance to the applied acceleration.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Lasers? Also I know that nanomachining equipment exists though I know almost nothing about it!
You shoot protons at it.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
pew pew pew
That's one way. To make pretty much any MEMs device takes 5 basic steps:
1) Deposition - if you're not using silicon, you have to get the material on your substrate. In more complex structures, you'll be adding various sacrificial materials for the etching step here.
2) Patterning - Cover the chip with a negative image of the thing you want to make, using special resistant materials. Basically prep for...
3) Lithography - This can be done with standard UV light, but if you need a finer pattern you can use electron beams or ion beams. The big downside being that they're much slower (read: more expensive) than standard UV. These eat away the parts of the resist that need to go away for the next step.
4) Etching - This can be either a "wet" or "dry" process, depending on the chemicals you use. This is really nasty stuff, like hydroflouric acid or xenon diflouride. Basically you cover the chip in this stuff and it will eat away the exposed parts, leaving you with your structure. If you play your cards right, you can pretty easily have a free-standing structure like a cantilever or the plates from earlier. The science behind this is hideously complex, and I honestly don't remember a lot of it. Has to do with how the crystals are structured and stuff.
5) Packaging - No one cares about packaging :P
Also what if I shine a light (or Laser) downhill, with a stiff breeze behind it? Explain that scientists!
Wowzers! Hey there, little lady. Those are might fine dagger-like teeth you have there.
Which you know, seems nonsensical until you remember that we've been able to stare back in time at the visible universe's beginning using telescopes, which should be impossible if we were expanding at less than light speed.
Every time a video of this project surfaces, the engineers and scientists driving the thing sound like just random people pulled off the street.
"OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT
THAT IS SO COOL, JESUS."
It's really adorable.
That's cause they basically are. Scientists are just people who have figured out how to make their weird hobby pay them instead, not some sacred priest-class raised from birth in the One True Way.
We're just trying to figure the world out, yo. Just like everyone else is.
More folk need to know that.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
I seem to remember learning that IN THE BEGINNING the universe was expanding at the speed of light because the light was pushing everything else apart. Is that right or am I crazy/dumb?
HOLY FUCK!
THAT"S FUCKIN AWESOME!
Yep! In fact, I've consistently maintained and argued that to be a good scientist, one needs to have a REALLY strong inner five year old.
We're not (for the most part) dour faced men with clip-boards going "Mrhrm yes yes I see. Yes. EXACTLY AS I PREDICTED".
We're the super-hyper five year old that just found a rock with these AWESOME square crystal growing out of it at guys, guys, you totally have to look at this oh man this is AMAZING!
It's the five-year old with a stick poking that REALLY WIERD thing he found on the beach to see what it does.
I am not an astrophysicist, but as I remember:
Current cosmology/astrophysicsts suggests that there was a brief period called "The Inflationary Epoch" shortly after the big bang where space/the universe itself expanded MUCH FASTER than the speed of light. And by much faster, I mean increased the size of the universe by a factor of 10^26 in a timespan of around 10^-30 seconds.
Note that this is current theory, however, and while some potential evidence of this was recently found, there confidence in that evidence was unfortunately reduced a bit.
I'm not sure how this concept was arrived at, but I suspect it was simply borne out by the math? This is waaaayyy outside my field, though.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/nov/19/penrose-claims-to-have-glimpsed-universe-before-big-bang
but of late I haven't been following any of this remotely closely.
A future full of nano-steam-punk tech would be pretty cool.
Basically The Difference Engine on a much, much smaller scale. Tiny tiny watchworks disassembling the world into gray gears.
Because I am science noob, I get info from physicists on youtube.