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 (involving subtractive manufacturing with metals).
Possibly even involving a lot of manual operation.
Contents
Proposals as-is infeasability
Metals and subtractive manufacturing become unsuitable
Saw blades and drills (chipping subtractive manufacturing more generally) quickly becoming infeasible for smaller scales. This is because ...
- Metals cease to be a good engineering material when going to smaller scales – See: Pure metals and metal alloys
- Atomic granularity and use of hard ceramic-like nonmetallic materials are unsuitable for chipping.
Proposal implies replication of a good part of the entire macroscopic manufacturing infrastructure
Also (and perhaps even more importantly) the Feynman path as-is is not feasible because of this:
Basically one would need to recreate a good part of the worldwide (multi material involving) modern manufacturing infrastructure
on a smaller (but not yet atomically precise) scale.
Note that both back in Feynman's times and still as of today (2022) not all of macroscale manufacturing is fully automated in
the sense of "needs no human hands involved".
So one would need to automate all the still hands-on operations in the manufacturing of manufacturing devices too.
Beside just the miniaturization.
One might argue that the proposed gem-gum on-chip factories also replicate all of macroscale technology within.
But that is incorrect. Atomic precision allows for:
- using much fewer materials by employing metamaterials
- fully digitized of manufacturing (no errors of half an atom too long or so)
... two main factors that massively simplify the problem.
Also it is bad enough to have the problem of technology recreation one time and
not a second time in a supercharged version.
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
Why named "Feynman" path?
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.)
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)
