Soft Machines in paperback

My book, Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life, has now been released in the UK as a paperback, with a price of £9.99. It should be available in the USA early in the new year. It’s available from from Amazon UK here, and can be preordered from from Amazon USA here.

Having an opportunity to make corrections, I re-read the book in the summer. One very embarrassing numerical error needed correcting, and anything to do with the dimensions of semiconductor processes needed to be updated to account for four more years of Moore’s law. But in general I think what I wrote has stood the test of time pretty well.

4 thoughts on “Soft Machines in paperback”

  1. Making products under the hospitable temperatures of a bioreactor is much cheaper than under a CVD furnace, or UHV conditions.
    A main reason the near future is softmachines. But one day extreme pressure and temperature industrial environments may be cheap enough to render valid some of the more radical nanotech predictions.

  3. Phillip, if a process really needs UHV to produce something for which the economic returns are high enough, then it will happen. But I don’t see much evidence of the cost of such environments falling much; the techology is relatively mature.

  4. Incrementally, Chinese production of progressively higher-end equipment should bring down UHV chamber prices. They make wind turbines at inferior quality to Europeans now, but will reach parity in a decade. UHVs maybe at 1/2 price in a decade and 1/2 that when India jumps on board a decade after China?
    P.Moriarty’s criticism of Drexler’s ideas can perhaps be used as a template to expose where some industrial innovations may occur. IDK the cost breakdown in UHV chamber manufacture, but I’d think the filter is a big part of it. Is filter technology mature? The physical chamber walls themselves appear bulkier than necessary. Presently they need to be baked to prevent outgassing, but there is no reason why a CNT or some other novel materials-scienced-substrate couldn’t be used. The actuator technologies for a potential mini-UHV system are only beginning to be explored by researchers like A.Zettl.

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