It's a Small, Small World

"Nanotechnology" promises endless abundance courtesy of molecule-manipulating robots. Is that nuts? And do we want it?

Ed Regis from the December 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

Drexler hated to make predictions about human beings and how long it would take them to accomplish a given thing. Nevertheless, since he was always asked the When will it happen? question he had worked out an answer, and after some hemming and hawing, he gave it: "I commonly answer that 15 years would not be surprising for major, large-scale applications."

Fifteen years. If this was to be believed, a rather strange situation was now occurring in the halls of Congress. A scientist was calmly informing the authorities that in the time it took for a newborn babe to reach adolescence, the country would be on the verge of the biggest and most sudden change in its history: Physical labor, assembly lines, paychecks would be things of the past; disease and aging would be gone and forgotten; poverty and hunger would be wiped out.

And all of it would happen in 15 years!

But not a word of it ever got out to the press. This was puzzling.

Or maybe it wasn't. "We only cover things that actually happen," said a Time editor, "not things that are just supposed to happen." In fact, maybe his whole scheme was nuts after all. Scientists, some of them, had some rather bad things to say about Eric Drexler.

Calvin Quate, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, said: "I don't think he should be taken seriously. He's too far out."

Nanotechnology itself came off no better.

"It's this basic hand-waving stuff that anyone can do," said Kurt Mislow, a Princeton University chemist. "It's like science fiction, and it turns me off in a major kind of way."

It was science fiction, so the argument went, because atoms couldn't be manipulated as if they were bricks. You couldn't pin them down or hold them in place, much less maneuver them around like marbles as Mr. Nano wanted to do. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the pillar of modern physics, put paid to that idea.

Plus, molecules were always jostling and bouncing and twitching around; they were always in constant motion. How could you build a mechanical device out of parts that never stood still?

And if by some miracle both those difficulties could be escaped and avoided, then radiation or friction or some other atomic complication would attack your little nano-mechanism and mangle it beyond belief. So much for Drexler's nano dreams.

The skeptics had a bit of explaining to do, however, when the name of Richard Feynman cropped up, as it invariably did. Even Al Gore knew about Feynman.

He said, "The best evidence that the research breakthroughs and the conceptual break throughs have long since occurred is that Dr. Richard Feynman made a speech 33 years ago in which he essentially outlined the whole field, and even researchers at the cutting edge today were sort of surprised when they went back and read the speech, and found out that the basic concept had been available for a long time."

Drexler never liked to hear this, that Feynman had more or less said it all, way back in the Dark Ages of 33 years ago. He said, "Feynman did indeed point in these directions, in a talk in December of 1959, and that has been an inspiration to many people."

The important point, however, was that Feynman had claimed that working with atoms was entirely feasible. "The principles of physics, as far as I can see," he'd said, "do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done." But if Feynman, the Nobel Prize­winning physicist the number-two genius, some said, after Einsteinif Feynman had said that way back in 1959, then why were the skeptics complaining, years later, that nanotechnology was "science fiction"?