Feynman path
- Up: Pathways
The "Feynman path" is referring to a naive but immediately self suggesting approach to
scale down manufacturing machinery containing saw blades and drills to the nanoscale.
The idea involves:
- making smaller machinery with bigger machinery and then
- use that smaller machinery to make even smaller machinery
- take a few steps until you arrive at the atomic scale
All that telepresence manipulator style.
Possibly even involving a lot of manual operation.
Practically this is not possible because of:
- Saw blades and drills quickly becoming infeasible for smaller scales.
- The multi material and semi manual complexity of our current day (and back then too) macroscale technology.
This approach has Feynman's name because this is how he formulated the then brand new idea of "nanotechnology"
in his famous talk "There is plenty of room at the bottom".
Richard Feynman is widely considered a brilliant physicist and educator.
Had he conducted more serious investigations he surely would have ended up with similar results to what is in the book Nanosystems.
Especially as he was a engineering leaning scientist.
(wiki-TODO: Put a citation of Richard Feynman's exact words here. It's in (part 1) of the external links below.)
Modifying the proposal
Actually there is one intermediary scale technology in existence that did not exist back in Feynman's times.
Microelectromechanical systems MEMS.
We don't make MEMS by telepresence micro-machining with tiny saws and drills but rather by etching and depositing though.
Using MEMS based scanning probe microscopes for positional assembly ...
- is a core part in the Direct path for getting e.g. towards 3D PALE and
- may also be useful in the Incremental path manipulating (/further assembling) bigger self assemblies positionally
External links
- Foresight Institute: Feynman Path to Nanotechnology
- Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part1) (part2) (part 3) (part 4) (part 5) (part 6) (part 7) (part 8) (part 9) (part 10)
