Foresight Debate with Scientific American
Foresight response to some thoughts
expressed in the August 1996 Scientific American
The "Letters to
the Editors" section of the August issue of Scientific
American carried four letters about the "Waiting for
Breakthroughs" article on nanotechnology published in the
April issue. Under the heading "Mega-discord over
nanotech" were three letters critical of the article (from
Carl Feynman, Edward Reifman, and Eric Drexler), and one letter
from James Haw of Texas A&M University supporting the April
article.
Prof. Haw professes to see parallels between nanotechnology and
cold fusion, and speculates that were Richard Feynman still with
us, he would reject "the appeals to [Feynman's]
authority" from "the nanotechnology crowd" and the
attempt (perceived by Haw) to cast Feynman in the role of "a
nano-Moses." Undoubtedly Richard Feynman would have had no
patience with cults or appeals to authority.
What is frustrating to those who have presented detailed
technical proposals on molecular nanotechnology is that proper
acknowledgment of the prior contributions of a brilliant and
creative mind is perceived as saying "you should believe
what we are saying because Richard Feynman had ideas
pointing in this direction." It would seem that instead the
principal use of appeals to authority in this debate has been on
the part of Scientific American, who base their
conclusion that nanotechnology is not feasible upon vague
statements by some prominent scientists unsupported by specific
technical criticisms of the specific proposals made.
Prof. Haw further cites the description of the Senior Associate
Program on the Foresight Institute Web page as evidence that
the attempt to raise funds "says it all" about the
"motivation behind too much of the current promotion of
nanotechnology..." This seems to this writer a strange
argument for one affiliated with an educational institution to
make. Foresight is a non-profit educational foundation subsisting
primarily on voluntary charitable donations. Is the work of
universities any less important or any less noble because they
often appeal to the public for charitable donations?
In response to the four letters, the editors of Scientific
American make clear that they stand by their treatment of
molecular nanotechnology in the April article: "...we think
that readers of the critique [SciAmResponse.html]
will find little in the way of specific cited errors."
What is most frustrating after this extended debate is not the
fact that the editors of Scientific American still
believe molecular nanotechnology not to be feasible. It is the
fact that no specific technical criticisms of the technical
proposals made have been offered. Is nanotechnology "cargo
cult science" because some principle of physics has been
ignored? Because computational simulation is inaccurate? Because
there is no conceivable practical route to device fabrication?
Why has Scientific American been so reluctant, in
this case at least, to engage in a real confrontation of
technical ideas and facts? I have no answer, but I found the
following quotation, forwarded by Chris Peterson,
thought-provoking.
-- Jim Lewis, Sept. 3, 1996
from "Read All About It" by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker (12/12/94):
"In the past twenty years, the American press has
undergone a transformation from an access culture to an
aggression culture: the tradition, developed after the Civil
War, in which a journalist's advancement depended on his
intimacy with power, has mutated into one in which his
success can also depend on a willingness to stage visible,
ritualized displays of aggression. The reporter used to gain
status by dining with his subjects; now he gains status by
dining on them....Aggression has become a kind of abstract
form, practiced in a void of ideas, or even of ordinary
sympathy. In a grim paradox, the media in America, because
their aggression has been kept quarantined from good ideas,
have become surprisingly vulnerable to bad ideas. Having
turned themselves into a forum for the sort of craziness that
was previously kept to the margins of American life, the
media have nothing left to do but watch the process, and act
as though it were entertaining; the jaded tone and the
prosecutorial tone are masks, switched quickly enough so that
you can appear active and neutral at the same time. Or, to
put it another way, the cynicism and the sanctimony turn out
to be a little like electricity and magnetism -- two aspects
of a single field, perpetuating themselves in a thought-free
vacuum."
Quoted from the book Dumbing Down: Essays on the
Strip-Mining of American Culture ed. Katherine Washburn
& John Thornton (Norton 1996).
Editorial in Analog
A recent addition to the discussion is "TOO
HARD?", an editorial by Stanley Schmidt published in the
January 1997 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Epilogue, April 1997, a year later
An article
on the Scientific American Web site hails computational
nanotechnology work done at NASA Ames Research Center as
showing that "...molecule-sized machine parts ... are
certainly plausible and could have enormous potential."
After describing the supercomputer molecular dynamics simulations
of gears made from fullerene nanotubes, done by Al Globus and
colleagues, the article concludes that "...more and more,
research is demonstrating that such things are possible--possibly
sooner than most of us think."
June 1997, from a post on sci.nanotech:
From cs.rutgers.edu!nanotech Thu Jun 19 20:43:30 1997
Redistributed: NanoTechnology:All Areas:Xerox
X-NS-Transport-ID: 0800207424C501001579
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 20:37:06 PDT
From: Nanotechnology Newsgroup Nexus
To: nanotech@cs.rutgers.EDU
Content-Length: 1496
Path: nanotech
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
TechSubList: t
From: johnmwrk@aol.com (JohnMWrk)
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Subject: SciAm Now Advertising Nanotech
Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu
I just received an interesting one page marketing brochure
from Scientific American offering a subscription to the mag.
It included four short paragraphs. One about curiosity. One
about science shaping our world. One about space exploration,
and yes one final paragraph about nanotechnology that reads
as follows:
"Nanotechnology promises to change our lives for good.
Machines and robots built atom by atom -- and measuring no
more than a micron across -- will fight cancer cell by cell
or store terabytes of data on space as small as the head of a
pin.
Join us on an amazing monthly quest for knowledge. Claim your
FREE trial issue of Scientific American today."
I find this to be pretty interesting. There have been a
couple of articles about nano sciences since the Gary Stix
article was run but nothing to indicate that nanotechology is
now something they are going to faithfully research and
report about on a regular basis. Of course this could be a
brochure that is customized to people with different
interest. I did send them a fairly lengthy letter explaining
my displeasure with the Gary Stix article and how I would not
buy another SciAm until there was fair reporting about
nanotechnology.
Has anyone else received one of these brochures?
John McPherson
JohnMwrk@aol.com
|