I recently gave the Inaugural Lecture for the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the Oxford Martin School, and the lecture video is now available.*

The talk describes the application of physical law and exploratory engineering to studies of the future potential of nanotechnology.

Summary here: News & Research Highlights.

* With thanks to Stuart Armstrong, researcher and occasional videographer

See also:

• Exploratory Engineering:
  Applying the predictive power of science
  to future technologies
• The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering
• A Map of Science
• How to Learn About Everything

Rosa and I now work at Oxford’s Martin School in the new Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. (My Oxford Martin School bio here; Rosa’s here.) We plan to be at Oxford while I finish work on my new book, Radical Abundance, to be published by PublicAffairs.

On November 10^th I will deliver the inaugural lecture for the Programme, “Exploring a timeless landscape: Physical law and the future of nanotechnology”.

About the talk

Subject: What physics tells us about the potential of advanced nanotechnologies, and why this points to an unexpected future.

A methodology grounded in physics and engineering can answer a limited yet illuminating range of questions about the potential of physical technology. This line of inquiry leads to a crucial question: What can physics tell us about the potential of advanced nanotechnologies? Well-established physical principles show that this potential embraces productive nanotechnologies that have the potential to transform the material basis of civilization. This prospect calls for re-evaluating both research opportunities and broader choices with consequences for the human future.

If you are in the area and want to schedule an appointment, please contact Rosa at GeographicEngine dot com.

I’m now working on a new book, Radical Abundance, scheduled for publication in 2012 by PublicAffairs. The book has a wide scope in both its content and intended audience, addressing scientists, a general reading audience, and thought leaders in the policy arena.

Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, but will go much further. The topics include:

• The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
• Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
• A personal narrative of the emergence of the molecular nanotechnology concept and the turbulent history of progress and politics that followed
• The quiet rise of macromolecular nanotechnologies, their power, and the rapidly advancing state of the art
• Incremental paths toward advanced nanotechnologies, the inherent accelerators, and the institutional challenges
• The technologies of radical abundance, what they are, and what they will enable
• Disruptive solutions for problems of economic development, energy, resource depletion, and the environment
• Potential pitfalls in competitive national strategies; shared interests in risk reduction and cooperative transition management
• Steps toward changing the conversation about the future

These topics interweave to make what will, I think, be a compelling story for readers with diverse interests, backgrounds, and concerns.

Update: As I mention in the comments, I’ll be posting the news on the blog when pre-orders are available, and inviting participation in pre-launch activities.

Publishers interested non-English-language rights please direct queries to Rosa at GeographicEngine dot com.

In response to (yet another) proposal to reorganize and redirect the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Russ Altman writes in Nature that

…it is crucial to separate the engine of discovery from the engine of application. Discovery is stochastic and opportunistic; application is the stuff of engineers. That is why attempts to over-engineer discovery fail and why science should not drive its application.

As the Chairman of the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford, he’s in a good position to speak out on this.

I’d go further with his second point: Where the aim is to build complex systems on an emerging, science-intensive technology base, it is absolutely necessary to direct scientific research to projects defined and judged by engineering criteria. To build a working system, the parts must fit together and form a complete set, and only systems-level design-oriented thinking can identify and define the problems to be solved. (This post discusses some of the coordination issues involved.)

Scientists move from nature to explanation; engineers move from aims to implementation. These are radically different tasks, and neither can substitute for the other. As Prof. Altman observes, they must be organized differently.

NIH reformers take note.

Roadmaps are crucial in developing new technology platforms — in other words, for the coordinated development of complete sets of compatible technologies that, taken together, support system-level technologies at a new level. Whether formal or informal, roadmaps address a fundamental problem of risk and mutual expectations in technology development: the problem of giving all necessary parties sufficient confidence that other parties will deliver the full set of technologies needed build functional systems.

Without that confidence, technology research can decay into a flurry of useless, context-free demos, and the development process can approach paralysis. With that confidence in coordinated, reality-based development, timely developments emerge, mesh, and spur the next round.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors

For decades now, a formalized roadmapping process with a 15-year horizon has helped to drive the Moore’s Law revolution in electronics. This cooperative, industry-spanning effort produces and updates the massive ITRS document, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.

This roadmap process has sped progress by coordinating efforts and reducing the risk of doing what’s necessary.

Each generation of lithography has required a set of improved and compatible technologies for light sources, optics, masks, steppers, resists, and a raft of other process and packaging technologies. To invest with confidence in developing a shorter-wavelength light source (of adequate collimation and brightness), and at a particular time, one must have confidence that there will be a market — and a market will exist only if other companies deliver the compatible optics, masks, stepper, and all the rest, and if the major producers plan to build fabs based on this suite of next-generation technologies.

The ITRS process provides that confidence and crystallizes the shared expectations into public documents.

Without shared expectations for coordinated development on a known timeline, the situation will tend toward deadlock. Not much happens if everyone waits for everyone else to provide what’s needed to create demand for everyone’s next-generation product. Only incremental improvement are safe in that sort of environment, because to avoid suicidal risk, each developer must maintain compatibility with what already exists.

Everyone yearning for something better, no matter how universal and specific the yearning may be, isn’t enough in itself. Only mutual expectations of action can give developers the confidence to invest in their hot new technology at a time when demand for it may be nil.

For another example of this principle, note that IT standards development often serves as a roadmap, building confidence, for example, that devices will be available that fit the protocols and plugs at both ends of a cable.

Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmap

Shared expectations that span technologies and industries are crucial in the semiconductor technology, and formalized roadmapping ensures that there will be no show-stoppers, no missing technologies for the next-generation technology platform.

It’s a different story for radical innovations in technology (such as quantum information processing) but again, if the aim is to build systems, real progress requires a roadmap-level conception of where it’s all going. Without a roadmap that defines requirements, thoroughly useless “advances” can be hyped as breakthroughs, and throughly practical technologies are apt to find no use simply because research on the needed complementary technologies never became fashionable.

The Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmap shows a way to do roadmapping in a domain where the nature of practical physical implementation technologies remains uncertain. Participants in the ITRS can safely assume that silicon will rule for years to come, but the QISTR collaboration faced a range of fundamentally different competing approaches: qubits represented in the states of (pick one or more:) trapped atoms in vacuum, embedded atoms in silicon, nuclear spins in small molecules in liquids, and photons in purely photonic systems. These approaches differ radically in scalability and manufacturability, and in the range of functions that each can implement.

The QISTR document therefore rises to a higher level of abstraction than ITRS, presenting the “DiVincenzo promise criteria” for functional system elements and then comparing diverse approaches in terms of those criteria and the metrics that go with them. The document addresses both the status of each candidate component technologies and what physics can tell us about its future potential.

The use of criteria and metrics in the QISTR shows a way to build a shared definition of problems and a basis for expectations in fields that buzz with multiple options for system components, and where the completeness and compatibility of sets of component technologies can’t be taken for granted.

The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems

The development of atomically precise nanotechnologies is an ongoing process, and Productive Nanosystems: A Technology Roadmap, a Battelle-led effort hosted by several of the U.S. National Labs, surveys paths forward from current atomically precise fabrication technologies toward atomically precise manufacturing. To quote from the Executive Summary:

This initial roadmap explores a small part of a vast territory, yet even this limited exploration reveals rich and fertile lands. Deeper integration of knowledge already held in journals, databases, and human minds can produce a better map, and doing so should be a high priority. Some research paths lead toward ordinary applications, but other paths lead toward strategic objectives that are broadly enabling, objectives that can open many paths and create new fields. These paths are the focus of this roadmap. They demand further exploration.

Successful engineering (unlike successful science) requires coordination. Tightly managed projects that deliver products to market are at one end of a spectrum of coordination mechanisms; international, cross-disciplinary roadmapping in the exploratory stages of technology development is at the other. Both can be invaluable.

See also:

• The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering
• Science and Engineering: A Layer-Cake of Inquiry and Design
• Exploratory Engineering:
  Applying the predictive power of science
  to future technologies

 
I’ll get back to posting more regularly, but meanwhile, here are a few of the most popular posts to date:

How to Learn About Everything

…the title above isn’t “how to learn everything”, but “how to learn about everything”. The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others.
This knowledge isn’t superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications…

[read more...]

Exploratory Engineering:
  Applying the predictive power of science
     to future technologies

…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…

[read more...]

A Map of Science

A comment on my previous post reminded me of a wonderful visualization that amounts to a map of the whole of science, generated by citation-based clustering of almost a million papers. The image above is a view of an extraordinarily information-dense representation, not just of connections among fields, but of their content…

[read more...]

The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering

Science and engineering are inseparable domains of thought and action, 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…

[read more...]

Self-assembling nanostructures:
  Building the building blocks

The road to complex self-assembled nanosystems starts with stable molecular building blocks, and the more choices a designer has, the better. Self-assembly of separate components and the folding of foldamers are similar processes: They work best when parts fit together well, and in just one way. Having more building blocks to choose from at the design stage will typically make possible a better fit, not only in a geometric sense, but also by in the sense of better complementarity of charge, hydrogen bonding, cross-linking functional groups, and so on. Having building blocks that fit together better enables the design of denser, more stable structures. Diversity helps…

[read more...]

The promise that launched the field of nanotechnology

…a concept called “nanotechnology” first swept into the minds of a large, science-aware public quite abruptly, in November 1986, when nearly a million readers encountered the cover story of a leading general-audience, science-oriented magazine of that time, OMNI. A month before, the term and concept had been known to very few beyond the earliest readers of Engines of Creation.

The story was headlined on the cover as:

This news just in:

A ‘buckyball’ — a spherical molecule made up of 60 carbon atoms — has been turned into a vial just big enough to hold a single water molecule….

The authors say that uses for the vial could include acting as a carrier for drugs in the body.
(News item)

As The Onion might ask, What do you think?

As I’ve said, scientists are held to a high standard when talking about scientific results with their peers, and a noticeably different standard when talking about potential applications with everyone else.

This just might be a cumulative problem for the credibility of science regarding (for example) climate change, and maybe even the potential of nanotechnology.

As a meta-oriented post, Metamodern is pleased to report a meta-meta-analysis.

In this month’s issue of the CDC-sponsored journal Preventing Chronic Disease, we find, published as a “Systematic Review”:

Quality of Systematic Reviews
of Observational Nontherapeutic Studies

…Of the 145 systematic reviews we found, fewer than half met each quality criterion; 49% reported study flow, 27% assessed gray literature, 2% abstracted sponsorship of individual studies, and none abstracted the disclosure of conflict of interest by the authors of individual studies….

On top of the often wretched methodological quality of individual studies, the compounded effects of data-mining, publication bias, and conflicts of interest, and the notorious problem of drawing causal inferences from epidemiological research, this meta-meta-analysis gives reason to be skeptical of the output of those studies even when filtered and combined by meta-analysis.

Collaborative efforts from investigators and journal editors are needed to improve the quality of systematic reviews.

And, one might add, to improve the quality of the studies that the systematic reviews study.