The Trajectory of Technology

While I’m on the subject of foundational concepts in the relationship between science and engineering, here’s the outline of a methodology for applying current science to assess lower bounds on the capabilities of a select subset of future technologies. (As many of you know, some of those lower bounds are startlingly high.)

A subset of the potential capabilities of future levels of technology can be understood by means of a design process that can be described as exploratory engineering. This process resembles the first phase of standard design engineering (termed conceptual engineering, or conceptual design), but it serves a different purpose:

• In standard engineering, design leads to the manufacturing of a product.
• In exploratory engineering, design leads to understanding of what a future manufacturing process could produce.

Because of this difference in objective (products vs. knowledge) conceptual engineering and exploratory engineering have both similarities and differences:

In the early 20th century, a missing fabrication technology was the combination of engineering expertise and metalworking techniques (among others) that were required to build large aerospace vehicles. The physics of rocket propulsion, however, were well understood, and the strength and weight of large, well-made aluminum structures could be estimated with reasonable accuracy.

On the basis of exploratory engineering applied to this kind of knowledge, engineers who studied the matter were confident that orbital flight could be achieved by means of multistage chemically fueled rockets. By the 1940s, a study by the British Interplanetary Society had filled in considerable detail and given a good estimate of the size of a vehicle that could reach the Moon.

Those who hadn’t studied the matter were sometimes confident of the opposite.

Astronomers who knew the daunting speed of orbiting objects (but didn’t trouble to examine the exploratory engineering analysis) sometimes called spaceflight absurd. In a characteristic move, a Professor of Physics and Chemistry, one A. W. Bickerton, demonstrated the impossibility of something irrelevant, then generalized it: He did a silly calculation that implicitly assumed that a rocket must put its fuel into orbit (and a bad fuel, at that), then announced that spaceflight was simply impossible.

Reasoning from the unworkability of a bad idea to the impossibility of a well-researched engineering concept is a repeated theme of interactions at the interface between science and engineering. (Engineers ignoring a crucial scientific fact is, of course, another.)

Here’s an entertaining list of quotations from the history and prehistory of flight, and spaceflight.

  

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The heart of the problem
(Full image below)

Science and engineering are inseparable fields, linked by a shared language of mass and energy, molecules and thermodynamics, physical systems and physical law. This shared language makes communication deceptively easy — easy, because scientists and engineers can see every detail in the same way; deceptive, because they see these details in different contexts, forming different patterns and presenting different problems. In a fundamental sense, science and engineering are antiparallel, facing in opposite directions. The resulting gaps in understanding can open a chasm wide enough to trip a manager, or to swallow a project.

As I discussed in a recent post, scientific inquiry and engineering design are often intimately interleaved (in projects, in activities, in creative minds), and to such an extent that (perilously!) they may seem the same. Here, I will focus on the differences that thread through a complex relationship.

A familiar pattern difficulties at the science/engineering interface often impedes corporate research, and I’m working with a former R&D manager to develop a presentation package that addresses this. In the broader technical community, however, similar difficulties impede progress in understanding what science can and can’t tell us about the future potential of technology, thereby impeding the development of reality-based policies. In both instances, the costs include delay, friction, waste, risk, and missed opportunity, and in both instances, understanding the structural basis of the problem can help to resolve it.

Antiparallel Structures

Both scientific inquiry and engineering design can be dissected into three levels: physical systems, concrete descriptions of physical systems, and general patterns that apply to an indefinitely large number of systems. Here’s a diagram that captures some key relationships:

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Not really a separate world

When Slashdot runs the slightly misleading headline, “Real Nanotechnology Getting Closer, Says Drexler” (with a link to the technology roadmap — lots of downloads!), the Tech Talk blog at IEEE Spectrum quite naturally reports this as “Eric Drexler has just been quoted as saying ‘Real nanotechnology is getting closer’”… and thus inadvertently reinforces the myth that so-called “real nanotechnology” has little connection with what researchers know is the real real nanotechnology, in the lab today — or at least, that Eric Drexler thinks so, and is rude about it, too. Supposedly. It’s a quote, right?

Well, no… But it’s a fine example of how myths take root and obscure reality. (See also magic “nanobots” and diamond-everything.)

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Science-intensive engineering

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Engineering-intensive science
(launch to Saturn included)

Inquiry is the essence of science, design is the essence of engineering, and in their pure forms, these activities are utterly different. Scientific inquiry draws observations from the world to reshape the mind; engineering design projects ideas from the mind to reshape the world. One is an eye, the other a hand, afferent and efferent flows of information.

This fundamental anti-parallelism can engender pervasive differences in perception and response, in problem definitions and solutions, and in how institutions are organized. The reasons for the differences are strong. Scientists without direction explore and make unexpected discoveries; engineers without direction flounder and fail to produce expected results. Applying a disciplined, engineering approach to scientific discovery can be stultifying, while applying a scientific approach to the bits and pieces of a system engineering problem can produce fascinating results, year after year, each gift-wrapped in an exciting press release — yet no working product.

Coordination of eyes and hands can be very useful, of course. I find technical progress to be most interesting in areas where scientists are pressing the limits of technology, and where engineers are pressing the limits of knowledge. The results are engineering-intensive science and science-intensive engineering. Some of the most impressive engineering in the world is done by scientists — high-energy particle physicists — who build awesome machines like the Large Hadron Collider. The space scientists who build instruments destined to orbit Saturn, or to fall forever into interstellar space, are of the same breed.

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The section below, adapted from a longer work, discusses the physical basis for understanding atomically precise fabrication systems: first, a very general class of systems, and second, the specific characteristics of high-throughput systems of a kind several technology levels above where we are today. (In my previous post, “A Telescope Aimed at the Future” I said a bit about science, modeling, and as-yet-unimplemented technologies.)

Regarding next-stage objectives for laboratory research and the trajectory of technology development, I’ve previously discussed:

• The path that led from hand tools to automated factories
• Next-stage experimental objectives for nanosystems development
• Self-assembly and directed assembly
• Thermal fluctuations, mechanical stiffness, and error rates
• Next steps in software for macromolecular engineering

Atomically precise manufacturing

Current understanding of potential systems for atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is based on long-established science, not on speculations regarding new or poorly understood physical phenomena. Molecular machinery in biological cells demonstrates the fundamental physical principles and operations that enable APM.

Here’s an outline:

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Often a good approximation

Our time in history is unique in that physical knowledge and computational methods enable partial understanding of technology levels above our own — and in some areas, far above. Because we understand the universal physical laws that govern matter and energy, we understand the physical laws that will govern the material structures of future technologies.

Our time is also unique in that growing computational capacity can enable us to simulate systems that have not yet been built: New aircraft typically fly as expected, new computer chips typically operate as expected. These same capabilities can also be used to simulate systems that cannot yet be built. These systems include some of the products and processes that will be enabled by higher levels of technology. Indeed, in semiconductor technology, a company must design chips before they can be made, or lose to its competitors.

Using computational simulation this way is like the earlier use of telescopes to view planets that spacecraft could not yet reach. Like a telescope, it does not provide a detailed picture — that is the role of spacecraft. But like a telescope, it can identify potential targets and help engineers plan how to reach them. And likewise, the easiest targets to see are not necessarily the easiest targets to reach.

  

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I was up in San Francisco this morning for the annual meeting of the International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS). These are the innovative surgeons who’ve been developing instruments and procedures that greatly reduce the collateral damage of surgical interventions, accomplishing what must to be done with less damage to skin, muscle, fascia, bone, etc., thereby reducing risk, pain, healing time, and disfigurement. They’re greatly interested in developing instruments that can work through smaller apertures.

By tradition, the ISMICS annual conference invites a speaker from another field to give the keynote address, and for 09 ISMICS, the field was nanotechnology. I spoke on “Nanotechnology and the Future of Medicine”, describing emerging nanotechnologies, the objectives set by the National Institutes of Heath nanotechnology roadmap, and some of the applications that advanced, atomically precise manufacturing will make possible. Questions from the audience looked toward yet broader horizons for the future of technology, society, and human life.