Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!sun-barr!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Craig Hubley) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: New nanotechnology books by Drexler Message-ID: Date: 22 Sep 89 00:13:04 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 34 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu JoSH, Actually, I have a more interesting question if you're going to ask Eric about his new books... Once he had the idea, how did he go about running it under the noses of people before he wrote EoC ? I know he published at least one paper on nanotechnology, but did this alone create a groundswell, or did he have to do a lot of work to publicize the concept and get feedback on it before EoC brought it to a wider audience ? The reason I ask is because I have an idea, also a piece of exploratory engineering, which has very major implications, and I would like to write an EoC-style book about it. However, although the ideas involved are relatively common currency, nobody seems to have synthesized them yet (kind of like bioengineering, protein synthesis, and electron microscopy, polymer chemistry, etc., all seeming unrelated until you put them together and realize the inevitability of an assembler). I'm keeping relatively mum about it until I have a chance to put it all on paper and verify that it makes sense. But that'll be soon, and then I'll be wondering what to do with it. Just what do you do with a piece of exploratory engineering ? Craig Hubley [From the Foreword to EoC (by Marvin Minsky): "...it is never entirely safe to trust one's own judgement in such matters, since all of have wishes and fears which bias what we think--without our knowing it. But, unlike most iconoclasts, Drexler has for many years courageously and openly exposed these ideas to both the most conservative skeptics and the most wishful-thinking dreamers among serious scientific communities like the one around MIT..." --JoSH]