Googling for Nanotechnology, continued

The fifth entry in a Google for the word "nanotechnology" is the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology. They focus on research, which means lab work, which means they don't publish molecular manufacturing theory. This is a change from the mid-90's, when they published a number of theoretical papers by Ralph Merkle.

The sixth entry is for the Institute of Nanotechnology. Their description of nanotechnology is quite broad, including lab-on-a-chip devices (which aren't nanotech at all, by most definitions I've seen) and also including what they refer to as bottom-up molecular nanotechnology. Even there, their description appears broad enough to include advanced chemistry, rather than being focused on productive nanosystems. Their list of nano books includes Our Molecular Future and Engines of Creation, both of which focus on molecular manufacturing.

The seventh search result is for Nanotechnology Industries, a nanotech portal. They have both nanoscale and MM-related news.

The eighth link points to the How Stuff Works entry on "How Nanotechnology Will Work." This entry is all about molecular manufacturing--the first two pages describe how products will be built by nanomachines working atom-by-atom, and nanoscale technologies aren't even mentioned until the third page.

The ninth link is to Scientific American's nanotech page. This page links to several articles on nanoscale physics results. It does not link to any of their articles on molecular manufacturing. This is probably just as well, because their treatment of MM has been of pretty poor quality. A couple of their articles have even inspired detailed rebuttals (and here's the second rebuttal) from people at the Foresight Institute and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The tenth link is outdated; it used to be a nano page hosted at Xerox PARC, where Ralph Merkle used to work. It's safe to assume that this was a molecular manufacturing-related page.

The eleventh link is... CRN's website! At least some of the time. Yesterday we were at the top of the second page; today it's another SciAm link, and we're number 12.

In summary, out of the top ten Google results for the word "nanotechnology," six or seven of them accept that molecular manufacturing is coming or at least post news about it, and only one or two are in active denial. Because Google's PageRank algorithm is based more or less on the quality of incoming links, we can conclude that a lot of people on the Web think molecular manufacturing-related sites are worth reading.

Comments

[Richard Jones]

The IoP journal Nanotechnology is, of course, where the Drexler/Phoenix paper "Safe exponential manufacturing" was published, so it's not right to say that "they don't publish molecular manufacturing theory". The relative scarcity of such papers is just a reflection of the fact that not much of this kind of work is being done.

[Niels Boeing]

>>They focus on research, which means lab work, which means they don't publish molecular manufacturing theory.<<

That's utterly funny though not intended by you. MNT and research are two different things... Apart from that this distraction about definitions of NT is getting a bit sectarian. NT is a new phase of technology in general that deals with nanoscale phenomena and materials. So surely any STM is NT, too. Where is the problem? You have already a specification, that is molecular NT, just stay with that but don't keep being astonished about the "false" use of the term NT. After all, it was not Eric Drexler who coined it.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

In fact, Eric Drexler did coin it. Taniguchi also coined it. Taniguchi coined it first, and included it in a paper on micro-machining. Drexler introduced the term to the world in 1986 (pre-web; not easy to search barely-related fields to see whether you were the first inventor of a word.)

I didn't hear Taniguchi mentioned until much later, when the technical objections to molecular manufacturing had started to fizzle, and a few mean-spirited people were looking desperately for any rumor to discredit Drexler with.

I didn't say or imply anything about "true" or "false" definitions. I don't know why you think I'm astonished by the fact that the word has two meanings. I do think it's interesting to see which sites oppose MM and which are willing to talk about it. If you think it's uninteresting, why did you comment?

Chris