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The Atkinson-Phoenix Nanotech Debate - Page 4 - Emails

July 17, from Bill Atkinson to Chris Phoenix
Subject: Re: Dialog page...

Hey Christopher,

Indeed I know of Mark Modzelewski! Flip over your copy of Nanocosm, and there he is with the lead endorsement: "Nanocosm is the nanotechnology book we have all been waiting for - accurate, realistic, and oh so readable. It's a rare book that researchers and business people can both enjoy." So there.

Now to the reaaaaaaly cool stuff. This is making me hop up and down. Hard to type that way, but hey
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"My God, am I now a nanobooster?!!?" I wrote to Rocky Rawstern yesterday. He replied: "Stranger things have happened. At worst, your arguments will force the nanoboosters to thoroughly think thru their positions. Might even change minds on all sides of the table. Heck, might even actually effect the outcome! Who'da thunk it! We live in hope :) "

I find this a tremendously exciting dialogue. I've stated and elaborated on my positions, which tend to come down to one thing: frustration. You've done the same thing, to the same result. Now we're both finding our mutual frustration may rest largely in perception. It's not just a matter of hyped PR: many points on both sides need to be addressed by real change, and real goodwill. The marketing communications I've been suggesting you undertake, must spring from genuine common ground, including genuine changes. But I feel now that this may actually be possible.

So here's another suggestion for you, which wraps up all my earlier suggestions. We've discussed various concepts: difficulty of having MAM speak with a single voice, credibility issues, funding &c. Now try this: A new institute. I call it The Calpurnia Institute, C. being Caesar's wife who "must be above suspicion." TCI would find, recruit, and isolate all working scientists interested in helping legitimize MAM via rigorous experiment.

No engineers need apply - TCI's mandate would be solely for experimental investigation. Engineering demonstration would come later (see below). TCI would out-Herod Herod: that is, it would go beyond even the rigor of Wood's Hole, Caltech, or Institute-Louis-Pasteur in requesting, formally and in writing, permission from other scientists outside TCI before citing their work. This shows the second aim of TCI, implicit rather than explicit: To gain the complete trust of the scientific establishment, as a necessary waystation to funding access.

Why not Foresight Institute, or CRN, or some other existing organization or institution? Answer: A new approach requires a new body; new wine needs new wineskins. TFI, while it appears to encourage a variety of opinions, is too closely associated with K.E. Drexler. It's his baby: he's past President and current Chair. There's a tiny whiff about TFI that it's KED's stalking horse: a cleverly organized front to give MAM legitimacy that it has not so far been able to achieve in strictly scientific terms. TFI, in other words, is stuck with a rep that has it being far more about PR than it does about science. Whether or not that rep (rap?) is true (and I think it is, at least to some degree) the reality is that this is its established image. TFI has gone way, way beyond the comfort level of the mainstream scientist: hence their opposition, extending in many cases to ridicule and (even worse for your funding chances) neglect. The scientific establishment, which is the group you're trying to convince, perceives TFI that way. So something utterly new, something utterly rigorous and squeaky-clean, is called for right from get-go.

TCI, rather than a private company, would thus be the vehicle for the MAM business plan. While non-profit, it could court and accept funding from private sources, as we have outlined above. The business plan would quickly evolve into a businessLIKE plan for pursuing new scientific data in deep support of the MAM.

Part of TCI's rigor would be its utter isolation from anything that's riled the scientific establishment (and that drove me crazy when I was writing Nanocosm). No corpsicles, no wild predictions, no squash-the-world's-machinery-into-a-breadbox, no dreaming in color, no castles in Spain. Only ideas that are immediately, directly testable: only sound, dull science. And those ideas will be immediately put to the test. You just watch how fast you'll get legitimated if you go at things this way. As you yourself so presciently note, you can try to change the rules within the system; or you can comment and criticize from the outside; but not both at once. TCI will in effect be a mitochondrion that the scientific establishment will be able to absorb in 3-5 years without a hiccup, and with a clear conscience.

I like your idea of pursuing sensors. Several of my interviewees identified this area as being critical to near-term nanotech. In fact some of the nanosensor firms I found were already in the black, or close to it. But I say again: TCI must restrict itself to very, very basic science. It cannot afford to be seen as limited to a single technology. It will exist to generate basic data. These data may then, along with data of a similar nature produced by the SE, be used to enable and liberate new nanotechnologies. But that's for later. "Your task, should you choose to accept it, will be" (as they say in Mission Impossible) to push the envelope: to pour the footings for tomorrow's nanotechnology. That's your bag. And you have to do it ultra-rigorously. No Merkle, raving to stupefied audiences about the joys of calmly calling your doctor when your heart stops. No corpsicles. No Antidisestablishmentarianism. No bloody emotion-based movements at all. Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts.

As you say, "Frustration leads to breaking the rules." Which leads to exclusion from the SE, which leads to more frustration, which leads to more rule-breaking, which leads to further exclusion, ad infinitum. That's the vicious circle that The Calpurnia Institute must set out to break. In doing so, it will also rein back MAM to address a single business level. Orderly experimental progression will most likely lead to orderly progression in whatever technology is spun off from TCI discoveries. It will be an incremental process.

Of course, original research being what it is - adventuring into The Undiscovered Country - there's always the chance that you'll stumble onto wild new effects that can support some truly revolutionary engineering. But that will happen in a way the SE knows and appreciates: first the science, then the technical applications. Again as you say, MAM has to date been driven by the engineers, who have imagined cool things and then set about trying to find ways to make 'em happen. From the SE's viewpoint, that's ass-backwards. And you know, they may be right. Try it their way: for all their rust, fust and harrumphy stodge, the SE do have several centuries of successes they can point to. What has MAM got to lose?

As for your lament that the Pentagon does not seem to be examining the possible effects of the molecular assembler, why should it? It is at least possible that, say, a workers' revolution will engulf parts of Eastern Europe, or that looming Latino majorities in the US Southwest should radically destabilize societies there. But it has yet to be demonstrated that the MA is even possible. Thus the establishments - scientific, political, military, financial - cannot and will not address the policy implications. They're not being staid here, just realistic. That (admittedly with a venom born of frustration at the MAM fringe) is what I say in Nanocosm. And this is what The Calpurnia Institute would address. TCI is your golden bridge to acceptability; thus to funding; thus to success. As it does its work, and assuming it does demonstrate MA feasibility, the policy discussions must follow as the night the day. I even foresee a letter to the White House, much like Einstein's famous note to FDR: "Mr President: Recent scientific data now indicate that..." And there's your Manhattan Project, right off.

But without clear and replicable data in support of the MA, that will never occur. Others will say and write, as they have written to me, that MAM may even be the unintended result of a CIA-sponsored disinformation project, attempting to lure America's commercial rivals into pursuing an unattainable piece of science fiction! So that foreign Manhattan Project you fret over may actually be a US Government aim! I'm not that paranoid: but there is now a clear dearth of sound data indicating an MA can be built. TCI will address this void. (I discount the datum that a Japanese speaker at a Foresight conference expressed confidence in the MA concept; TFI would hardly invite, say, me to address them - part of that perceived, and I think real, TFI bias.)

Let me say explicitly, here, that I'm still not convinced an MA is possible, let alone feasible. I don't think all scientific showstoppers have demonstrably been overcome. But why not answer both our objections via TCI? Whatever it uncovers would settle the matters of possibility and feasibility once and for all. Then one of us could buy the other a drink and we could have a good laugh at all the storm and fury of debate in the past.

As for not judging leaders by their followers: Why not? In fact, one must do this. A responsible leader must disavow any followers that discredit him and his movement. The President, for example, cannot be seen to be allied, and cannot ally himself, with the Ku Klux Klan. I would have a lot more respect for KED if he said to the corpsicle crowd: Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire. But it's not gonna happen. KED, I think, has elected for numbers rather than rigor. It seems democratic; but science has never been democratic in that way. It must always subjugate itself to the objective truth. As I pointed out in Nanocosm, you can't adjust the gravitational constant by popular vote.

In fact The Calpurnia Institute would be best to treat KED as the SE has done: as Joe Stalin treated Trotsky. The latter, you will recall, was a big man on campus in the Russian Revolution. But he wanted to export revolution, and Uncle Joe wanted to consolidate it first in Russia. So Trotsky had to go into exile. Time for this here, I think. It seems cruel - thanks for getting us going, now take a hike - but loyalty here will doom MAM to perpetual low Earth orbit.

Yes, the fringe will be ignored, and (as you write) "scientists will flock to the...reasonable voice." The cacophony will not be increased because TCI will leave the fringe far behind, and its voice will dwindle. Now and then we'll see a letter to the editor, as we do today about the threat of cosmic rays crashing the world computer system. But the genuine MAM will have been advanced, and legitimized, as it never could have been otherwise.

Bill