X-Message-Number: 32967
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:55:00 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <>
Subject: Can Mark Plus give a coherent technical argument here?
References: <>

> From: MARK PLUS <>
> 
> Suppose someone published a description of the laser as a
> theoretical possibility in 1960, but nobody could build one despite
> all the impressive calculations and illustrations. What would we
> think of the laser idea if, 50 years later, we still didn't have
> lasers, but we had "laserololgists" who referred to the original
> text as something like scripture,

The Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics were published
significantly longer than 50 years before the Wright Brothers.

Therefore, there are no airplanes, and those equations are clearly
wrong.

Want to know why we have no MNT? Because it is going to take thousands
of people working on the problem full time, and we have about
ten.

Imagine if there had been ten people working on nuclear technology
during WW-II instead of the thousands that were devoted to the problem
-- would we have gotten nuclear technology? We needed people refining
uranium ore, people building enrichment plants, people doing vast
numbers of calculations, even people doing things like building power
lines in to Los Alamos. Ten people couldn't have managed it.

The MNT problem is much harder, and we have only enough people to do
very basic analysis, not real design and implementation, so all you
get is basic analysis. We're at the stage of Szilard and a couple of
buddies doing back of the envelope calculations saying "this can be
done", not at the stage of people figuring out how many screws are
needed to clamp down a tube going into a centrifuge in the enrichment
facility.

I could draw analogies to lots of other problems in science and
engineering, but the point here is dead simple.

It isn't like people have been trying desperately for decades to make
these things work and their experiments are failing. No one is
performing any experiments. We don't have enough people to conduct the
experiments. We don't have the people needed to build the tools to
conduct the experiments either. We have enough people to figure out
what is possible and do very general high level studies.

To make this thing happen, we'll need to solve tens of thousands of
small engineering problems, just like the Manhattan Project had
to. Most of them will not look terribly much like work on MNT just
like figuring out the lubrication needed for the coolant pumps for the
breeder reactors at Oak Ridge did not look terribly much like nuclear
weapons design.

We'll need to make many specialized tools that don't exist to get from
here to there. We need CAD software, CAM software, various kinds of
ultra-high vacuum equipment, SPMs capable of repeatedly moving a probe
tip to the same sub-angstrom spot after traveling a couple of cm away,
conventional synthetic procedures for large numbers of precursor
molecules, metrology and sensing equipment, and the list goes on and
on and on and on.

It isn't even that hard to build many of the tools, just as it wasn't
that hard to figure out how to pump coolant into a breeder reactor,
but someone has to work on all these niggling little problems, and we
don't have those people.

Equally bad, there were a lot of good physicists that the Manhattan
Project folks could draw on to do the actual engineering of the device
and figure out all the little problems they needed other people to
work on, and we don't have enough of the equivalent people -- yet.

So, MNT can't be said to have "failed" as it has not yet been tried
for real. You can't call a field of engineering a failure until it has
actually been attempted.

There are other, quite similar cases I can apply. By your logic, the
Higgs Boson, which was postulated to exist almost 50 years ago, can't
possibly exist because until recently we didn't build a machine to
check. You would call all the writing on it "scripture" and say that
you had no obligation to explain what was wrong with the ideas because
after fifty years no one had actually found a Higgs Boson.  You would
doubtless say, as you have on MNT, that you found no need to even try
reading the papers since you could tell they were clearly wrong
without reading them -- a dubious proposition to say the least.

Now, the Higgs might or might not exist, of course, but your logic
would be worthless.

The internal combustion engine was a simple enough invention that,
given machine tools, several people build the things on their own in a
few months. Consider instead the LHC at CERN. Unlike the internal
combustion engine, building the tools to check if the Higgs is there
has taken thousands of smart people tens of years of hard work. People
have had to do things like designing control systems for
superconducting magnets, software to drive massive disk arrays for
data collection, etc. The mere lack of such tools in, say, 1980, would
not have been reason to think that the work from 1964 on the Higgs
mechanism was necessarily wrong. The LHC wasn't the sort of thing five
people could go out into the shop and build over a weekend. It isn't
like an internal combustion engine or an improved bicycle helmet.

So, lets circle back to the core here. When we can't settle an
argument like this with demonstrations -- one can't, for example,
determine if black holes are possible by handing someone a black hole
you made in the lab -- we calculate.

Drexler and others have done lots of good calculations based on
extremely straightforward physics. Again, can you tell me what's wrong
with Drexler's papers, or for that matter Merkle's, or Freitas', or
anyone else in the field? If you can present reasonable arguments, we
can take you seriously.

A stream of logical fallacies is not an argument against a scientific
paper. "This hasn't been built so it can't be" is not an
argument. "Drexler's work is treated like scripture" is not an
argument against the content even if it were true, and it isn't even
true. "I can't believe you have the gall to ask a fiftyish guy who
manages a hotel to read a book as boring and stupid as Nanosystems"
(nearly a quote from you) is not a valid argument, either.

If you can't state specific issues with the work that has been done,
why should we take your complaints seriously?

Until then, you're just behaving like a politician, not a scientist.

Anyway, I think the final and inarguable rebuttal is a mirror.  If
molecular manufacturing is impossible, how come you, an object made by
molecular manufacturing, are there? What is it that is looking at you
in a mirror if molecular manufacturing is impossible?

> A rational person who witnessed such a circus in 2010 would dismiss
> lasers as a fantasy and an exercise in rent-seeking, most likely.

The "rent seeking" concept is laughable given how little money is
devoted to the field. However, even discussing "rent seeking" in this
context is a logical fallacy. Even if the field was populated by
nothing but charlatans, that does not mean anything about whether the
ideas are correct, or incorrect. Truth or falsehood is independent of
the people doing the arguing. You are, again, resorting to the
techniques of the politician, not the ones of the scientist.

When you resort to the methods of science and not those of someone
seeking office, we can take you seriously.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		

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