Nanotechnology: Grey goo or great God?

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NanotechnologyGrey goo or great God?

• CiS-St Edmunds Templeton Lecture
• Cambridge, 10th March 2005

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What is nanotechnology?

• Nanoscience is the study of phenomena and
  manipulation of materials at atomic, molecular
  and macromolecular scales, where properties
  differ significantly from those at a larger
  scale.
• Nanotechnologies are the design,
  characterisation, production and application of
  structures, devices and systems by controlling
  shape and size at nanometre scale.
• Nanoscience and nanotechnologies opportunities
  and uncertainties.
• The Royal Society The Royal Academy of
  Engineering, 2004.

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Length scales
Nanotechnology
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Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman

• MONSIEUR JOURDAIN
• Well, what do you know about that! These forty
  years now, I've been speaking in prose without
  knowing it! How grateful am I to you for teaching
  me that!

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Nanofabrication ion beam milling
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Key historical event 1990
Eigler writes IBM with individual Xe atoms.
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How small can computers get?
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The worlds smallest test tube
Pulsed ESR
Rabi period 64 ns
A nitrogen atom can be put into a C60 fullerene
cage.
Spin coherence time T2 gt 0.24 ms, giving many ESR
Rabi oscillations.
2 nm
Incar-fullerenes can be put in a carbon nanotube
to make an array of qubits (www.nanotech.org).
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The worlds smallest test tube
5 nm
A. Khlobystov et al. Angewandte Chemie
International Edition 43, 1386-1389 (2004 hot
paper)
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Do we see Gods hand in natural nanotechnology?
How is your stomach acid?
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The amazing design of natural nanotechnology
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Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

• 1968 Isaac Asimovs science fiction novel,
  Fantastic Voyage is made into a movie
  starring Racqel Welch.

the only woman in the crew of a miniaturized
submarine which is injected into the blood
stream of a defecting scientist in order to melt
an inoperable blood clot in his brain
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Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

• 2003 Agent Cody Banks

His mission befriend fellow teen Natalie in
order to gain access to her father, a scientist
unknowingly developing a fleet of deadly nanobots
for the evil organization ERIS.
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Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

• 1986 Eric Drexler, publishes Engines of
  Creation, The Coming Era of Nanotechnology.

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Nanotech will destroy the world

• As engines of destruction, nanotechnology and AI
  systems will lend themselves to more subtle uses
  than do nuclear weapons. A bomb can only be used
  to blast things but nanomachines and AI systems
  could be used to infiltrate, seize, or control a
  territory or a world.
• Drexler, Engines of Creation, 1986, p. 174
• The nightmare is that combined with genetic
  materials and thereby self-replicating, these
  nanobots would be able to multiply themselves
  into a gray goo that could outperform
  photosynthesis and usurp the entire biosphere,
  including all edible plants and animals.
• American Spectator, February 2001
• Grey goo is a wonderful and totally imaginary
  feature of some dystopian sci-fi future in which
  nanotechnology runs riot, and microscopic
  earth-munching machines escape from a laboratory
  to eat the world out from under our feet.
• Guardian, July 2001

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Sources of confusion about nanotechnology
Jack discovers his wife's firm has created
self-replicating nanotechnology--a literal swarm
of microscopic machines. Originally meant to
serve as a military eye in the sky, the swarm has
now escaped into the environment and is seemingly
intent on killing the scientists trapped in the
facility
Drawing on up-to-the-minute scientific fact,
Prey takes us into the emerging realms of
nanotechnology and artificial distributed
intelligencein a story of breathtaking
suspense. Prey 2002 dust jacket
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Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

• 2003 Tabloid headlines
• Prince Charles fears grey goo nightmare.

2004 Says he was misrepresented that he does
not believe in self-replicating nanotechnology.
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Belief paradigms

• Agnostic. One who holds that the existence of
  anything beyond material phenomena cannot be
  known (OED). Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), cf.
  Acts 1723.
• Benjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol), In this
  university we speak Latin, not Greek the Latin
  for agnostic is ignoramus.
• Atheism. Disbelief in, or denial of, the
  existence of a God. A little superficial
  knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of
  man to atheism. Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
• Deism. Belief in the existence of a God, with
  rejection of revelation natural religion.
  Deism being the very same with old Philosophical
  Paganism Richard Bentley (1662-1742).
• Theism. Belief in a deity or deities, as opposed
  to atheism. Belief in one God as creator and
  supreme ruler of the universe, without denial of
  revelation in this use distinct from deism.

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Belief paradigms
creator sustainer
agnosticism ? ?
atheism ? ?
deism ? ?
theism ? ?
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Another old issue
the argument from design
The exquisite structure of biomolecular systems
enables their optimum function. What is the
origin of this? Creation or Design or Apparent
Design?
Paley said that if you find a watch there must be
a watchmaker.
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Intelligent design
Chapter 1. LILLIPUTIAN BIOLOGY This book is
about an ideaDarwinian evolutionthat is being
pushed to its limits by discoveries in
biochemistry. When sciences such as physics
finally uncovered their foundations, old ways of
understanding the world had to be tossed out,
extensively revised, or restricted to a limited
part of nature. Will this happen to the theory of
evolution by natural selection?
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Belief paradigms
What we cannot explain caused by God
Wrong!
All observed phenomena
GOD
a universe with no edge in space, no beginning
or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to
do. Carl Sagan (foreword to A Brief History of
Time)
What we can explain caused by science
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Are we to play at God with nanotechnology?
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The Cavendish Laboratory
The great oak doors opening on the site of the
original building had carved on them, by
Maxwell's wish, the text from Psalm 111 Magna
opera Domini esquisira in ornnes coluntares ejus.
Shortly after the move to the new buildings in
1973 a devout research student suggested to me
that the same text should be displayed, in
English, at the entrance. I undertook to put the
proposal to the Policy Committee, confident that
they would veto it to my surprise, however, they
heartily agreed both to the idea and to the
choice of Coverdales translation, inscribed here
on mahogany by Will Carter. There is a legend
that when Rayleigh wished the same text to stand
at the beginning of the six volumes of his
Collected Papers, the Cambridge University Press
demurred, on the ground that some readers might
misunderstand who was the Lord referred
to. Professor Sir Brian Pippard FRS, Eur. J.
Phys. 8 (1987) 231-235.
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Let us make man in our image
????????? ????????, ???????? ????? ????????????
?????????????

• Gen 127
• Refers to whole man (not just intellect etc.)
• Means predominantly a duplicate, a clone
• Refers upward to relationship with God
• Mankind is created to stand before God. Claus
  Westermann, Creation.
• Personhood is bestowed on him as the distinctive
  characteristic of his nature. Eichrodt, Theology
  of the Old Testament.
• Refers downward to relationship to creation
• Man is Gods executive, to take responsibility
  for the world. von Rad
• Man himself is the image of God, who has no
  image of his own. Clines
• Includes the concept of accountability
• Perhaps the most satisfying of the
  interpretations of the meaning of the image of
  God in man is that which sees it as basically
  responsibility. C.F.D Moule, Man and Nature.

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The physical nature of information

• Kai o Logo? sarx egeneto
• And the word flesh became
• John 114
• logo? the controlling principle of the universe
  (Filw)

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The physical nature of information

• Could this concept of information be defined in
  sufficiently precise terms for scientific
  purposes? What information technology has
  brought into being as a self-conscious discipline
  in this century is a new level of causal analysis
  additional to the classical level of physics. In
  the level of control-analysis you have a flow
  of information.
• Donald MacKay, Behind the Eye (1991)
• there is an irreducible interdependence between
  cognitive and neural processes calling for a
  duality of description but without necessitating
  belief in a dualism of substances.
• Malcolm Jeeves, CiS conference 2003
• (Science Christian Belief, 2004)
• The take-home message of what Malcolm presented
  is that we need to re-think body-soul (or
  body-mind) dualism in favor of some form of
  monism, wholism, or physicalism.
• Warren S. Brown, 2004 ASA/CSCA Annual Conference

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The physical nature of information

• Information theory and statistical mechanics
• The great advance provided by information theory
  lies in the discovery that there is a unique,
  unambiguous criterion for the amount of
  uncertainty represented by a discrete
  probability distribution, we will consider the
  terms entropy and uncertainty as synonymous.
• E.T. Jaynes (1957)
• Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and
  the universal quantum computer
• The reason why we find it possible to construct,
  say, electronic calculators, and indeed why we
  can perform mental arithmetic, cannot be found in
  mathematics or logic. The reason is that the laws
  of physics happen to permit the existence of
  physical models for the operations of arithmetic
  such as addition, subtraction and multiplication.
  In this section I present a general, fully
  quantum model for computation.
• David Deutsch (1985)

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The physical nature of information

• Information is not a disembodied abstract entity
  it is always tied to a physical representation.
  It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet,
  a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a
  mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This
  ties the handling of information to all the
  possibilities and restrictions of our real
  physical world, its laws of physics and its
  storehouse of available parts. the mere
  possibility of quantum parallelism has changed
  theoretical computer science permanently.
• Our scientific culture normally views the laws of
  physics as predating the actual physical
  universe. In the beginning was the Word and the
  Word was with God, and the Word was God (John
  11), attests to the belief.
• Rolf Landauer (1996)