Category: General

This week’s quotation on Soft Machines comes from that pioneer of British empiricism, Sir Francis Bacon:

It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation can suffice for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.

I write this with Philip Moriarty in mind, since he’s going to be taking a break from participating in debates on Soft Machines and elsewhere. I would like to record my gratitude to Philip, because he’s made a tremendous contribution to this blog in the last couple of months. I think he’s made a really important contribution to the debate, not least by forcibly reminding us how subtle and complex surface physics can be. As another oft-quoted saying goes (usually attributed to Wolfgang Pauli):

God made solids, but surfaces were the work of the devil.

I’m grateful for this glowing endorsement from TNTlog, and I’m impressed that it takes as few as two scientist bloggers to make a trend. But I’m embarrassed that Howard Lovy’s response seems to have taken the implied criticism so personally. I’ve always enjoyed reading NanoBot. I don’t always agree with Howard’s take on various issues, but he’s always got interesting things to say and his insistence on the importance of appreciating the interaction between nanotechnology and wider culture is spot-on.

But I think Howard’s pained sarcasm – “Scientists, go write about yourselves, and we in the public will read with wide-eyed wonder about the amazing work you’re doing and thank you for lowering yourselves to speak what you consider to be our language” – misses the mark. There are many ways in which scientists can contribute to this debate besides this crude and demeaning de haut en bas caricature, and many of them reflect real deficiencies in the ways in which mainstream journalists cover science.

To many journalists, science is marked by breakthroughs, which are conveniently announced by press releases from publicity hungry university or corporate press offices, or from the highly effective news offices of the scientific glamour magazines, Nature and Science. But scientists never read press releases, and they very rarely write them, because the culture of science doesn’t marry at all well with the event-driven mode of working of journalism. Very rarely, real breakthroughs really are made, though often their significance isn’t recognised at the time. But the usual pattern is of incremental advances, continuous progress and a mixture of cooperation and competition between labs across the world working in the same area. If scientists can write about science as it really is practised, with all its debates and uncertainties, unfiltered by press offices, that seems to me to be entirely positive. It’s also less likely, rather than more likely, to lead to the glorification and self-aggrandisement of scientists that Howard seems to think is our aim.

I’m grateful to Tim Harper for some kind words about me in his column on nanotechweb.org. Giving his roundup of how nanotechnology fared last year, he notes that 2004 ” was also the year that the tricky issue of the Drexlerian idea of molecular manufacturing – the version popularised by the Foresight Institute – finally began to be addressed in a scientific manner”, and he mentions both this blog and my book Soft Machines in connection with this. But, as he goes on to say, “there is much work to be done, however, to build trust between the scientific and molecular nanotechnology communities”.

To build trust, you need understanding. It’s probably true that many in the scientific community have not made the effort to understand the point of view of the molecular nanotechnology community. But equally, I think that in that community that there is a very widespread lack of understanding about how science works. I don’t mean this in the sense that they don’t understand the scientific method or basic scientific results; it’s the sociological aspects of science as a human enterprise I’m talking about here. You need an understanding of how science as a collective effort selects problems and makes progress in order to be able to predict and understand the ways in which nanoscience will turn into nanotechnology.

A simple example of the sort of misconception that results is the widespread view in the molecular nanotechnology community that the high profile scepticism of figures like Richard Smalley is all that stands in the way of progress towards their goal, because scientists are discouraged from pursuing these lines of enquiry for fear of their career. The truth is absolutely the opposite; there would be no surer way for a young scientist to become rich and famous than by proving Smalley wrong, and you can be confident that if someone with the right experience and the right equipment could think of a way of making a big step towards demonstrating mechanosynthesis, they would be doing it now. And if they were successful, they’d probably find space for a few kind words about Drexler in the speech they gave as they accepted their Nobel prize…

Anyone who has tried to buy a copy of my book Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life in the last few weeks will notice that there have been problems of availability – higher demand from the USA than the publisher anticipated has resulted in stocks being cleared out. My publisher now tells me that new stock has just arrived from the printer at the UK warehouse, so within a few days the book should be easier to get hold of.

A couple of 1/2 hour documentaries about nanotechnology, made by the EU nanotechnology program, are now available online.

Nano: the next dimension is a serious and straightforward documentary, introduced by the French Nobel Laureate chemist Jean-Maire Lehn, and featuring other eminent European nanoscientists such as Cees Dekker, Harry Kroto and Christian Joachim.

Nanotechnology is aimed at the younger audience. It has does have some good things, despite its rather cheesy attempts to connect with youth culture, and (in the English version) terrible dubbing. It does, however, feature a very silly animation of a medical nanobot.

My thanks to Raymond Monk from the European Commission for bringing this to my attention.

New readers of the more visionary writings on advanced nanotechnology could be forgiven for thinking that it’s the desires of the writers that come first. They want the material lifestyle of a billionaire, they want to travel in space, they want to live for ever – and advanced nanotechnology is invoked as a Deus ex Machina to make their wishes come true. Scientists are taught not to covet their own hypotheses – not to want to believe in their own theories so deeply that their critical judgement is clouded. This is a good principle, though one that’s difficult for fallible humans always to follow. Science has delivered huge improvements to the human condition, and nanotechnology has the potential to improve things much more. But, difficult as it is, we need to focus not on what we want, but what we can achieve, given the constraints of the universe we live in.

In the words of Sir Michael Jagger,
“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need”.

With thanks to David Bott, and a Happy New Year to all my readers.

You can see a video seminar on soft nanotechnology jointly given by me and my colleague Tony Ryan on the web here. This isn’t exactly new; it was done a couple of years ago, but I’ve only just come across the web version, which was done as an experiment in e-learning under the aegis of the Worldwide Universities Network, an alliance of Universities in Europe, the USA and China. You’ll need a fast internet connection and the Shockwave plug-in to view it.