A found frame in the office reminds me. It was a smalltalk. On nanotech. I did a live, and unfortunately, unrehearsed demo of the new Nanotex waterproof khakis. I took a glass of water and splashed my waist with vigor to show how it would leave no mark. In a freak instance of fabric folding, the bolus of water hooked into a gaping open pant pocket. The inner pocket lining did not have any Nanotex coating…. So for the entire talk my boxers were soaking wet, but you wouldn’t know it because none of the water could seep through the outer pants fabric. The baggy trousers photo below is post-mishap.
On screen is a Scanning Tunneling Microscope scan of dyads of atoms (carbon monoxide) on a copper surface. We got to play with these during a visit to Don Eigler’s labs at the IBM Almaden Research Center. A room full of equipment interfaces to a PC with a mouse that lets you move atoms around with audible feedback as you drag them across the surface (imagine the copper lattice atoms are bumpy like eggs in a carton).
In this particular example, carbon monoxide is lined up like dominos on the surface. With a flick on one end, they tumble like a child’s cascade. In this case, they are pre-configured to implement a logic circuit (the world’s smallest 3-input sorter). It was 260,000 times smaller than the smallest IC equivalent at the time.
Circuit design experiments were done with regular dominos. The business expense report for dominoes raised some eyebrows at IBM.
My TED 2007 Talk was a whole lot more fun — 🚀 The Joy of Rockets
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