A news article in this week’s Nature discusses the origin of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative, but the story sets some of the causality in reverse. The story outlines how science advocacy at the Federal level in 1999 led to presidential and congressional support in 2000, and says that afterward…

…a certain amount of hype was inevitable. To the extent that these things can be measured, it began at the birth of the NNI and peaked in the middle of the decade. Researchers who perhaps hadn’t previously called their work nanotechnology looked for ways to relabel their research to take advantage of the new funding. The media published optimistic stories….‘Nano’ soon became the hottest prefix in science.

Actually, as bibliometric statistics indicate, the media stories, hype, and relabeling began their surge a decade earlier. The surge began with an idea that gripped the public imagination and polarized the scientific community — the idea of nanotechnology as a technology of atomically precise fabrication based on nanoscale machines, able to deliver surprising productive capabilities and products.

This idea initially defined nanotechnology, and this fact of history is responsible for what would otherwise be inexplicable: the persistent idea that nanotechnology is about molecular machines that (in the derived mythos) mimic life.

Nothing in the NNI research agenda can explain the perverse link between materials science and the mythology of hungry nanobots, but this 1986 OMNI headline provides more causal insight:

 

This (once again) is the November 1986 cover of OMNI, then a science-oriented magazine with a readership of about one million. Only a month before, the term “nanotechnology” had been familiar mostly to early readers of Engines of Creation. This is what followed:

Engines of Creation, boosted by the 1986 OMNI cover story,
launched a wave of excitement about the promise of nanotechnology,
followed by a surge of support for research in diverse nano-related fields.

• “The promise that launched the field of nanotechnology”

• U.S. National Academies Report on Molecular Manufacturing

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 questions are thrown in. They are inserted to help you cultivate in yourself the very valuable habit of rigid self-examination….

You will soon discover that these questions are so framed as to require you to read not only on the lines and between them, but also right down into them. Even then you will not be able to answer all of the questions. The information may not be in the book at all….

If you occasionally come to a question which you can neither answer nor dismiss from your mind, be thankful for the question and that you are bright enough to be affected in this way. You have doubtless discovered that some of your best intellectual work, your most fruitful study, has been done on just such questions.

[emphasis added in bold]

These paragraphs are about metacognition and information search strategies, and they set a high standard. If you’ve seen similar advice to students in modern textbooks, please comment on it. The quality of current textbooks in this regard may be higher than I expect, and that would be good news.

A comment on my recent post, “The problem: a metacognition deficit,” reminded me of a striking illustration of cultural change, the level of the language and content of a book used in the 1890s to teach high school civics (available in plain text, a big pdf and simulated in-browser book ). It reeks of a culture that fostered metacognition.

[Update: I found crisper example (see next post).]

Just for fun, read the whole excerpt:

Some time ago, my friends, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., requested me to write a small book on Civil Government in the United States, which might be useful as a text-book, and at the same time serviceable and suggestive to the general reader interested in American history.
[....]
It is, moreover, the mental training gained through contact with local government that enables the people of a community to conduct successfully, through their representatives, the government of the state and the nation. And so it makes a great deal of difference whether the government of a town or county is of one sort or another. If the average character of our local governments for the past quarter of a century had been quite as high as that of the Boston town-meeting or the Virginia boards of county magistrates, in the days of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, who can doubt that many an airy demagogue, who, through session after session, has played his pranks at the national capital, would long ago have been abruptly recalled to his native heath, a sadder if not a wiser man?
[....]
If you have not already done so, it would be well worth while for you to organize a debating society in your town or village, for the discussion of such historical and practical questions relating to the government of the United States as are suggested in the course of this book. Once started, there need be no end of interesting and profitable subjects for discussion….A few hours every week spent in such wholesome studies cannot fail to do much toward the political education of the local community, and thus toward the general improvement of the American people. For the amelioration of things will doubtless continue to be effected in the future, as it has been effected in the past, not by ambitious schemes of sudden and universal reform (which the sagacious man always suspects, just as he suspects all schemes for returning a fabulously large interest upon investments), but by the gradual and cumulative efforts of innumerable individuals, each doing something to help or instruct those to whom his influence extends. He who makes two clear ideas grow where there was only one hazy one before, is the true benefactor of his species.

For an outside perspective, here’s a quote from a review of the book in Science magazine, 19 September 1890:

Questions for pupils, and suggestions for teachers, adapt the work for use in schools; and its value is increased by an appendix containing the Articles of Confederation, the National Constitution, a translation of the Great Charter of King John, and other interesting documents.

i think high school books and teachers and kids are not so high now

For a good overview of structural DNA nanotechnology and DNA origami (a molecular wonder of the modern world), see this presentation from a course in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. The subject calls for a strong visual presentation, and the slides deliver this together with a good description of DNA engineering principles and an extensive bibliography.

Anyone who wants to understand the power of modern molecular self-assembly techniques — atomic precision on a million-atom scale — needs to be familiar with this topic, and this presentation the best starting point that I’ve seen.

Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns,
by Paul Rothemund (Caltech),
presented for the ECE550 course by Abdullah Akce

For an update on larger scale, 3D applications of DNA origami see also:
“A Third Revolution in DNA Nanotechnology”.

…there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate…

Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

David Brooks, (“A Case of Mental Courage”, New York Times)

Brooks begins with the story of how Fanny Burney mustered the courage to set in writing (hence remember and relive) the experience of her mastectomy — the cutting of flesh, the scraping of bone, and more. There was, in her day, no surgical anesthesia.

In reaching his diagnosis of modern American culture, Brooks describes the decline of cultural expectations regarding metacognition, a process that feeds the flames of confirmation bias on the internet.

“How to Learn about Everything”, now in Belorussian translation:

(With thanks to Patricia Clausnitzer!)

I’ve updated “The Physical Basis of High-Throughput Atomically Precise Manufacturing”. Not a big change, but I expanded the discussion of reliable molecular modeling of selected, highly constrained systems, along the lines discussed here: “Making vs. Modeling: A paradox of progress in nanotechnology”.

A reader asks a general question about mechanosynthesis — How could a device release a reactive molecule once it’s bound to a product? — and I’d like to outline why there are many answers.

Mechanosynthesis is a very broad concept, and describes the operational principle of mechanisms that range from ribosomes in cells to rotary devices in prospective high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing systems (about which, see: physical basis, National Research Council assessment [pdf], technology roadmap)

The answer therefore depends on the application, and the right place to look for answers is usually in existing chemistry, with occasional excursions into density functional theory.

For example, there are many chemical reactions that transfer one or a small group of atoms from one covalent structure to another, and some of these reactions can be useful in mechanosynthetic contexts (S_N2 reactions, acyl transfer, and hydrogen abstraction, among others).

Another strategy is to transfer a reactive molecule as a whole, using relatively weak binding interactions to fix it to a device while it is positioned to form strong, covalent bonds to the product structure. There is, of course, an enormous literature on noncovalent binding interactions.

To think productively about this question in a general and relatively comprehensive way requires an understanding of the fundamental principlea of a range of non-covalent interactions, of transition state theory and statistical mechanics, of covalent bonding and the challenges of organic synthesis, and of a range of methods and phenomena described in specialized literatures in several fields of chemistry and materials science.

Fortunately, the areas of greatest current interest today are largely outgrowths of molecular biology and supramolecular chemistry. These are areas where there are many competent researchers and established techniques. The great need today is to organize this knowledge around problems of designing and building next-generation macromolecular systems, exploiting self-assembly.

It’s important to remember that there’s no sharp line between self-assembly and mechanosynthesis.