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WORLDCOMP'09 Featured Keynote - Dr. K. Eric Drexler
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Advanced Nanotechnology: Advanced Computing on the Critical Path
Dr. K. Eric Drexler Father of Nanotechnology Chief Technical Advisor, Nanorex, Inc. Bloomfield Hills, MI USA Date: July 13, 2009 Time: 9:45 - 10:40 AM Location: Lance Burton Theatre |
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"Some seminal works stand out like beacons in the history of science.
Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" and Watson
and Crick's "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" come quickly
to mind. In recent decades we can add Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation," which established the revolutionary new field of
nanotechnology." -- Ray Kurzweil, inventor, and author of The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology |
The long-standing objective for advanced nanotechnology is to enable the fabrication of atomically precise, highly functional products on a practical basis. Laboratory research is laying the foundations for the necessary series of advances in nanofabrication, but inadequate computational tools hinder progress. As nanotechnology evolves into nanosystems engineering, there is an increasingly urgent need for domain-specific design-oriented software. Among the requirements for this are multi-scale modeling to unify the design of molecular and macroscale systems, and in particular, expansion and unification of diverse tools at the molecular end of the spectrum. This will require the integration and invention of diverse software tools, and some problems will require massive computational power. In the coming years, scientific investigation and discovery will remain crucial, but the pace of progress will increasingly be set by the power and limitations of computational tools for nanosystems engineering.
Often described as “the father of nanotechnology,” Eric Drexler set the technical direction for the field in his seminal 1981 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which established fundamental principles of molecular engineering and development paths to advanced nanotechnologies. In his 1986 book, Engines of Creation, he introduced a broad audience to the fundamental technology objective: using machines that work at the molecular scale to restructure matter from the bottom up. Drexler’s research in this field has been the basis for numerous journal articles and a comprehensive, physics-based analysis in his textbook Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation. In his publications and lectures, Dr. Drexler describes the implementation and applications of advanced nanotechnologies and shows how they can be used solve, not merely delay, large-scale problems such as global warming.
Dr. Drexler serves as Chief Technical Advisor to Nanorex, a company developing design software for molecular engineering. In addition, he writes about nanotechnology and other topics on his blog, Metamodern.com. He is currently working in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund of Sweden to explore advanced nanotechnology solutions to global issues such as energy and climate change. Recently, Drexler served as Chief Technical Consultant to the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems, a project of the Battelle Memorial Institute and its participating US National Laboratories.
Drexler was awarded a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Molecular Nanotechnology (the first degree of its kind).
