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I was thinking recently how there used to be about a lot of talk about waldos and nanotechnology. I think the idea was to build a Waldo that can assemble a 1/10
by le-mark 2y ago
I was thinking recently how there used to be about a lot of talk about waldos and nanotechnology. I think the idea was to build a Waldo that can assemble a 1/10th scale Waldo, repeat and voila you are soon building nano scale contraptions. It’s a very intriguing idea, seemingly not practical though.
- Jeff_Brown 2y agoIts operation at each scale would be very different, and it's not obvious how many different layers we'd need before we'd be at the smallest possible, but maybe.
- XorNot 2y agoTechnically we already can go from human scale to nano or even atomic scale in "one operation". i.e. a scanning tunneling microscope you etch a tungsten wire in acid and then can go and look at individual carbon atoms at room temperature. An atomic force microscope is even more direct - while not absolutely "atomic" - you can definitely with a sharp enough tip push things around on the nanoscale. The problem is definitely as you note: things do in fact behave very differently when you're doing that.