So
What happens on Dec. 21, 2012 then?

know something we dont?

Rob

Nanotechnology is only in its infancy, if that. How can ANY educated person expect a baby to walk and talk on the same day it comes out of the womb? How long did it take the computer to become useful? 40 years. Nanotech isn't going to take quite that long to become useful, in fact, December 21st, 2012 sounds about right for the technology to meet and produce its promises.

People who write such negative articles are only doing it for attention. Unfortunately, for them, when Nanotech DOES deliver the promises everyone is expecting, these people/idiots will be looked down upon.

Great post Mark, a tribute to why I love 'n.'

Kaku is a smart guy, but between writing graduate texts and popular books on quantum field theory, extra dimensions and string theory, as well as on US nuclear policy, and making speeches against star wars and "nukes in space" as well as teaching courses at CUNY, I think he's a bit overextended.

His book "Visions" does not seem to go deeper than the usual high-level jounals such as Science, Nature, Spectrum and so on. I've skimmed the book, mostly looking at the same sections you did. It is certainly a fount of conventional wisdom.

It's interesting to compare Kaku's treatment of nanotech with his gushing enthusiasm for quantum computing, which (as a person working in the field) I tend to regard as one of the few technological "visions" more outlandish than self-replicating universal assemblers.

The difference is that QC has been adopted by the same academic physics establishment that has disowned assemblers. Why? I think the main reason is that physicists are desperate to find something useful that they can claim as their own. QC clearly falls within the purview of physics, unlike advances in semiconductor tech, biotech, or molecular nanotech, to which EEs, biologists, and chemists have a more obvious claim. QC deals in entangled states, hamiltonians and paradoxes. Physicists love this stuff; nobody else can understand it. Assemblers are Popular Science content by comparison.

Never mind that biology gives an existence proof for self-replicating nanosystems, while the ultimate feasibility of quantum computing (at least in the standard quantum-binary picture) is still in doubt, and it may take assemblers to make the kinds of physical systems that would be needed to realize QC. For the moment, QC has empowered physicists. Once again we're working on an enormously powerful potential breakthrough, and no one else can touch us!

So you get hundreds of academic physicists working on "quantum computing," actually, for the most part, basic research on quantum-mechanical systems that might one day serve as a basis for QC; but almost none working on "assemblers," although hundreds are at work on the basic research that may one day serve as the basis for developing assemblers.

And, as a corollary, you get the kind of "educated" opinions reflected in Kaku's book.