Credit: ESO. Acknowledgement: Martin Pugh
"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman
This is apparently Richard Feynman's last thought written on a blackboard.
Where computation and fabrication meet: using computers to mimic biology. Zack Booth Simpson
Couple of recent thoughts about the above video which is about Eric Winfree's path to nanomanufacturing. He's making a community of molecular programmers who will make layers of programs which can make molecular nanomanufacturing on larger and larger scales, easier and easier. It's like in computers, you have machine level programming languages, and then you have programming languages that understand human language. This seems hard and it seems like it can work. It also seems like it will take a long time to get anything going.
Here I'm thinking the benefits of the bio pathway, Eric Winfree style, will be more interesting than the initial surface perception would indicate. While the ability to make something as complex as a whale is certainly a far off dream(although, if sufficiently advanced A.I. comes around, well, that would be a big help), making macroscale simple objects might not be so hard. I'd like to note that Eric Winfree's team has been given a lot of money recently to carry out his program. He's also just one guy/team doing, well, dna-nanomanufacturing. I'm saying that as Eric Winfree carries out his program, there will be 'many' spinoffs along the way - nanoengineered macroscale products.
-------------------------Science news extras 1.2!
Feynman diagram rules vastly generalised; Einstein's spacetime about to be put in its place
experimental brain tissue
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