Posts tagged as:

history

Metacognition, then and now
(a crisp example)

September 2, 2010

As a follow-on to recent posts here and here, I’d like to offer a crisp example of the standards of cognitive reflection that were taught in the once-upon-a-time United States: a sample from Studies in Civics (1897), a high school textbook.
TO STUDENTS.
You will notice in chapter one that at the close of nearly every paragraph [...]

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Chemists deserve more credit:
Atoms, Einstein, and the Matthew Effect

February 17, 2010

Chemists understood the atomic structure of molecules in the 1800s, yet many say that Einstein established the existence of atoms in a paper on Brownian motion, “Die von der Molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme Gefordete Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten Suspendierten Teilchen”, published in 1905.
This is perverse, and has seemed strange to me ever since [...]

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The Wall Street Journal on Feynman,
Drexler, History, and the Future

January 9, 2010

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday, “Feynman and the Futurists”, about Feynman’s ideas, mine, how the nanotechnology bandwagon got rolling, and how the band got thrown off the wagon — and then, out of the shadows, the NRC report and why the U.S. government should implement the NRC’s recommendations.

[...]

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“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”
(Richard Feynman, Pasadena, 29 December 1959)

December 29, 2009

“Feynman’s 1959 talk, entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’”, was delivered 50 years ago today, and the words I’ve quoted above are the first words in the first sentence of the first paper I wrote, almost 30 years ago, on what later became known as “nanotechnology”. Feynman read and discussed the paper with [...]

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The promise that launched

 the field of nanotechnology

December 15, 2009

Part 1 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

When the first million readers encountered “nanotechnology”
Now, over 20 years after the fact, it is easy to forget that a concept called “nanotechnology” first swept [...]

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The Technology Tree

December 18, 2008

When I look around my office, almost everything I see is either a person, a plant, or the product of machines. If you’re facing a computer screen, very likely your surroundings are similar.

The Forge of Vulcan(detail)

Diego Velázquez

But where did these productive machines come from? With varying degrees of human help, they were themselves made by [...]

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