/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3754036

>The tooltip. I refer readers to the following paper from the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanotechnology that Eric Drexler and I wrote concerning the use of a molecular tooltip for dimer transfer in mechanosynthesis. I will, accordingly, skip a lot of detail and say that the dimer-transferring tooltip seems completely reasonable in a mechanosynthetic context. One of the biggest problems I’ve run in to with people arguing against specific aspects of mechanosynthesis is the reactivity of the tooltips being proposed for building these larger structures. If this were chemistry, I’d agree completely. My mechanosynthetic response is very simple. If you work with a system where all interactions NOT between tooltip and workspace are forbidden, then you only get what you want in the fabrication process. That requires, and will require, environmental control beyond what we can do now in the lab, but anyone today that doesn’t see a possibility for improvement in their work aren’t looking hard enough.
>The designed tooltip, which we refer to as DC10c, contains, by design, considerable strain and high potential reactivity in the wrong environment. But if you put a stark-raving mad homicidal lunatic on a deserted island with no one to kill and only vegetables to eat, he’s an OK guy. There’s a big difference between chemical stability and chemical reactivity. The closest structural analogue to the DC10c tip as shown in the movie is the molecule cycloheptyne, which degrades or polymerizes rapidly in solution but which can be studied exhaustively in matrix isolation. This molecule is highly reactive, but I have the vibrational and electronic spectra for that molecule in pdf form on my laptop. A solution-based DC10c approach to deposition would be riotously unpredictable, given the same studies on the strained cycloalkyne rings and, therefore, useless in AMM. That difference between stability and reactivity is key to understanding mechanosynthesis.

>>3603912

150,000 words and that's for the unfinished part one out of three or five (In the same book). And that's after discarding 9/10ths of what I'd written because it did not match with my current (Less furry) conception of the story.