Nanotechnology:Grey goo or great God?

CiS-St Edmund’s Templeton Lecture

Cambridge, 10th March 2005

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.

Length scales

Nanotechnology

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!

Nanofabrication: ion beam milling

Key historical event: 1990

Eigler writes IBM with individual Xe atoms.

How small can computers get?

The world’s smallest test tube

A nitrogen atom can be put into a C60 fullerene cage.

Spin coherence time T2 > 0.24 ms, giving many ESR Rabi oscillations.

Incar-fullerenes can be put in a carbon nanotube to make an array of qubits (www.nanotech.org).

2 nm

Pulsed ESR

Rabi period 64 ns

A. Khlobystov et al. Angewandte Chemie International Edition43, 1386-1389 (2004 “hot paper”)

5 nm

The world’s smallest test tube

Do we see God’s hand in natural nanotechnology?

The amazing design of natural nanotechnology

Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

1968: Isaac Asimov’s 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

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.

Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

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

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

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 intelligence–in a story of breathtaking suspense.”

Prey 2002: dust jacket

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.

Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

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 17:23.– 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.

Belief paradigms

creator sustainer

agnosticism ? ?atheism deism theism

The exquisite structure of biomolecular systems enablestheir optimum function.What is the origin of this?Creation or Design or Apparent Design?

Paley said that if you finda watch there must be a watchmaker.

Intelligent design

Chapter 1. LILLIPUTIAN BIOLOGY

This book is about an idea–Darwinian evolution–that 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?

What we can explain“caused by science”

What we cannot explain “caused by God”

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)

Belief paradigms

Are we to “play at God” with nanotechnology?

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 Coverdale’s 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.

נּו Qֵמ Sְל Uַצ Sם ְּב Yה ָאָד ֶׂש[ ֲע_ Uים, נ bֹלה dר ֱא ֹּיgֱאֵמ[ Uַונּו Qֵמּוֵת Sָד bִּכ

Let us make man in our image

Gen 1:27

• 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 God’s 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.

The physical nature of information

And the word flesh became

John 1:14

= the controlling principle of the universe ()

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

• Information theory and statistical mechanicsThe 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 computerThe 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)

The physical nature of information

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 1:1), attests to the belief.

Rolf Landauer (1996)