Foresight Update 22
Page 1
A publication of the Foresight Institute
 Nanotechnology
on the Web
by Lewis M. Phelps
Nanotechnology and
the World Wide Web were made for each other. On one hand,
nanotechnology is a complex and intellectually diverse subject
with ties to many scientific disciplines. It portends rapid
technological development and significant social and economic
changes. It's a field in which knowledge is growing
exponentially...faster than the printed page can accommodate.
On the other hand, unless you have spent the last year camping on
the Barents Sea shores of Novaja Zemlja, you know that the World
Wide Web is an explosively fast-growing communications medium
whose unique ability to forge links between loosely related
pieces of information is changing the way people work and learn.
(If you don't already have access to the World Wide Web, read the
accompanying sidebar story, "Getting on the Web," on
page 7.) This article profiles some of the main nanotechnology
sites on the Web. Internet addresses of all mentioned sites are
included in a sidebar on page 6.
Browsing through these sites spotlights the truly global nature
of research underway on nanotechnology-related subjects today.
Beside numerous U.S. institutions, significant work is described
in Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, France, the United
Kingdom, and Hungary. By the time you read this article, new
countries are likely to have joined the list.
Foresight and IMM have just published their
first rudimentary home pages. Watch these over the next few
months as they evolve. (Web addresses for these and all pages
described here are given in the accompanying box.)
Meanwhile, an excellent nanotechnology entry point to the Web is
the Nanotechnology page
created by Dr. Ralph Merkle
at Xerox's Palo Alto
Research Center. As most Foresight Institute members know,
Ralph is deeply involved in nanotechnology-related work,
including creation of computer software used to design
molecular-level machines.
This well-designed and up-to-date nanotechology home page
features an excellent introduction to key nanotechnology
concepts, a number of related articles, a comprehensive listing
of books, periodicals, other key print documents related to the
subject, and links to other major nanotechnology Web sites. Ralph
has recently added the complete text of Richard Feynman's
now-famous 1959 talk at Caltech, "There's Plenty
of Room at the Bottom" If you're new to nanotechnology,
this is an excellent place to begin learning.
Also not to be missed at this site is Ralph's witty and
devastating rebuttal of criticism aimed at nanotechnogy concepts
by an ill-informed book review in Nature magazine. The writer
apparently chose the book review as a vehicle for a general
attack on nanotechnology. Ralph's rebuttal concludes, "The
New York Times published an article in 1920 explaining that
flight to the moon was impossible because there wasn't any air
for a rocket to push against. Nature now joins the club with
[this] article."
Another highly useful site is NanoLink-Key
Nanotechnology Sites on the Web. Offered by the National
University of Singapore and Memex Research, this home page offers
a comprehensive set of links (over 50) to world-wide sites with
nanotechnology-related information.
From either of these sites, you're only a mouse click away from
other valuable sources of nanotechnology information. Without
attempting a complete catalog (well beyond the space limits of
this article), some sites worthy of special notice are:
- The Nanotechnology
Archives at Rutgers University, presided over by Dr. Josh Hall,
have an extensive collection of items on nanotechnology
and related subjects. This is one of the earliest and
most significant nanotechnology presences on the
Internet. Josh's FAQ
("Frequently Asked Questions") page is a
must-read for newcomers to nanotechnology. This site also
includes most back issues of Foresight Update.
- One particularly interesting item in the
"related" category at Rutgers is an essay by
Robin Hanson, written in 1990 when he was a visiting
fellow at Foresight
Institute. "Could Gambling Save Science?
Encouraging an Honest Consensus" argues that
science's current system of "peer review is just
another popularity contest, inducing familiar political
games; savvy players criticize outsiders, praise
insiders, follow the fashions insiders indicate, and
avoid subjects between or outside the familiar subjects.
It can take surprisingly long for outright lying by
insiders to be exposed." He proposes a novel system
of wagering, or Idea
Futures, as a means to provide financial incentives
to encourage the emergence of sound scientific thinking.
Like the Science Court and Hypertext concepts, his
proposal could help to advance scientific thought (see
Update 10).
- Laboratory for
Molecular Robotics at the University of Southern
California. Created by Dr. Ari
Requicha (see Update 20),
this page describes the work of Dr. Requicha and his
colleagues with Scanning Probe Microscopes and other
technologies of possible use in building molecular-scale
machines.
- Nanomanipulator
Project at the University of North Carolina. This
site describes a multi-university project (whose work is
mentioned on page 10 of this issue) to develop a virtual
reality simulator of Scanning Tunnel Microscope
operations.
- Molecular
Manufacturing Shortcut Group, part of the National
Space Society. This Web site looks at the implications of
nanotechnology for building space craft, space
exploration, and space settlement.
- Nanotools:
The STM Home Brew Page. For those with curious minds
and hot soldering irons, this site offers complete plans
to build your own scanning tunnel microscope for about
$1000. You, too, can manipulate matter at the atomic
level-in your basement workshop!
- Initiatives in
Nanotechnology at Rice University. This home page
describes nanotechnology-related work underway at this
Texas university, divided into "wet"
(biological aspects), "dry" (mostly
carbon-based), and computational nanotechnology. The
three subjects are highly inter-related, Rice says.
Finally, new nanotechnology-related sites appear on the Web
with some frequency. You can find them with "search
engines" such as WebCrawler. Some simply point to the other
nanotechnology sites; others have real content.
Perhaps representative of these newcomers is a personal home page
created by Tom Nugent,
a U.S. citizen interning in the Space Development Division at
Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries in Japan. Through his
interest in space travel, and personal connections with several
people involved in Molecular
Manufacturing Enterprises Inc., he became interested in
nanotechnology. He created the nano-page, he says, because,
"after I finish the internship here in Japan, I plan on
attending engineering graduate school, most likely in an area
that would allow me to do work in nanotechnology. So I am using
the links on my nano-page to stay up-to-date with developments,
as well as to become familiar with the people in the field. And
of course so that anyone who finds my page can learn more about
nanotech." Tom's home page also provides interesting links
to Web sites devoted to Space Development, Japan's Space Program,
Search Engines, and Ballroom Dancing.
Lew Phelps is guest editor of this issue of Update. He prowls
the Web through an America OnLine connection from his office in
Pasadena, CA.
Web
URL's for Nanotechnology Sites
Foresight Institute
 http://www.foresight.org/
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing
http://www.imm.org/imm
Nanotechnology (Ralph Merkle's page at Xerox)
http://nano.xerox.com/nano
Nanolink: Key Technology Sites on the Web (in Singapore)
http://sunsite.nus.sg/MEMEX/nanolink.html
Nanotechnology Archives (at Rutgers)
http://nanotech.rutgers.edu/nanotech
Idea Futures
http://hanson.berkeley.edu/ideafutures.html and
http://if.arc.ab.ca/IF.shtml
Laboratory for Molecular Robotics (at USC)
http://alicudi.usc.edu/lmr/molecular_robotics_lab.html
Nanomanipulator Project (at UNC)
http://www.cs.unc.edu/nano/etc/www/nanopage.html
Molecular Manufacturing Shortcut Group
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/
Nanotools: The STM Home Brew Page
http://www.skypoint.com/members/jrice/STMWebPage.html
Initiatives in Nanotechnology (at Rice University)
http://cnst.rice.edu/
Tom Nugent's Home Page
http://www2.gol.com/users/nugent
Dr.
Ralph Merkle on nanotechnology and the Web
I first got interested in nanotechnology when I heard Drexler
give a talk on the subject at Stanford, circa '85 or '86. I read Engines of Creation
and rapidly concluded that Drexler was fairly obviously correct
in the substance of his conclusions. I was somewhat surprised,
therefore, when I found that there were very few people working
in this area. My interest in this area increased over the next
few years, until I eventually decided to pursue it full time at Xerox PARC. Given the
likely impact, I continue to view this area as remarkably
underfunded and under researched, though there is at last
evidence of growing interest.
With the explosive growth of the Web during the past year it's
rather obvious that here, at last, is a communications and
publication medium that takes advantage of electronic
distribution in a sufficiently convenient manner that it can
secure a mass audience. As Web publication is rapid, convenient,
and permits the individual author to bypass the slow and clumsy
refereeing process, I adopted it as soon it was obvious that it
would more easily permit distribution to a wider audience than
the more conventional paper publication.
Those familiar with my past work in cryptography might recall
that my first publication on public key distribution was held up
for three years by the referees because it was "not in
keeping with current cryptographic thinking." My opinion
both of the referees for that particular paper and of the
refereeing process in general were correspondingly reducedWhile
some traditional magazines continue to argue that refereeing is
essential to maintain "quality," it has been my
experience that monopoly, even the limited monopoly provided by a
magazine or journal, simply slows down the dissemination of new
ideas.
The Web, of course, makes it easy for bad ideas to get their own
page; we risk being swamped by second-rate pages. This problem,
however, can be relatively easily dealt with by reputation.
People who maintain quality Web sites will soon become
recognized, and links recommended by those sites will be read
more rapidly. A new page that is worthwhile will at first attract
little interest, but as time goes by and more people evaluate it
and find it worthwhile, the web of links pointing to the new page
and recommending it will increase. Casual readers who have
neither the time nor the inclination to search out the obscure
but well-done page can rely on established pages to point the
way.
At the present time, my nanotechnology
page (http://nano.xerox.com/nano) is receiving about 100
"hits" each day. (Note that there are many more hits on
the site as a whole, but somehow I don't think that retrievals of
small "gif" files used to dress up the nanotechnology
page provide an unbiased estimate of the traffic). I expect this
number to increase as the Web grows. Naturally, I would encourage
anyone working on nanotechnology to establish a Web page and
describe his or her work on it.
The upcoming Fourth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology is using the
Web extensively. The conference page is at
http://nano.xerox.com/nanotech/nano4.html. It currently has a
list of speakers and their topics, and some abstracts. We'll be
making preprints of the papers submitted to the conference
available on the Web, as well.
From Foresight Update 22, originally
published 15 October 1995.
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