steven0461 comments on FAI FAQ draft: What is nanotechnology? - Less Wrong
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Comments (23)
Isn't an H atom more like 0.1nm in diameter? Of course it's fuzzy.
I agree with steven0461's criticisms. Drexler outlines a computer design giving a lower bound of 10^16 instructions/second/watt.
Should there be a ref to http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html ?
Quibbling about words: "atom by atom" seems to have caused some confusion with some people (taking it literally as defining how you build things when the important criterion is atomic precision). Also "nanobots" was coined in a ST:TNG episode, IIRC, and I'm not sure if people in the field use it.
Apparently .24nm is twice the Van der Waals radius and .1nm is twice the Bohr radius. I'm not sure which one has a better case for being called the "true radius".
Ah -- .1nm is also the C-H or C-C bond length, which comes to mind more naturally to me thinking about the scale of an organic molecule -- enough to make me wonder where the 0.24 was coming from. E.g. a (much bigger) sulfur atom can have bonds that long.