Ralph Merkle

certainly don't disagree. An acquaintance of mine has trying to get him work on Cryptocurrencies where Merkle trees are all around. he showed some interest and was very open to new ideas. he has a nice website http://www.merkle.com/ http://www.merkle.com/1974/RejectionLetter.pdf "I had failed to provide any references to the prior work on public key cryptography, and the reasons previous workers in the field had rejected it as impossible. I should have looked up "public key cryptography" on Google before submitting my paper. My defense is feeble: there was no Google, the term "public key cryptography" did not yet exist, and there were no previous workers in the field. There were no words for what I had done, and looking up a concept to show that no one had previously thought of it is difficult. This is not a unique problem: it illustrates a problem faced by anyone trying to explain a new idea to an "expert" who expects a properly referenced article anytime anyone tries to explain something to them. The more a new idea is unrelated to any prior idea or concept the more it must appear as a squawling bastard, naked and alone, appearing de novo and lacking any respectable pedigree or family to vouch for its acceptability."

ACM did at least acknowledge Merkle in 1996, along with Adleman, Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, and Shamir, in the inaugural Paris Kanellakis Award[1]. Merkle has an article on his website about the history of his public-key cryptography work[2]. [1] http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/merkle_4605383.cfm [2] http://www.merkle.com/1974/

Let's spare a few moderated neutrons for Project Pluto: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

ObNukeRef: Project Pluto[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto [2] http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

The OP asks reasonable technical questions about medical nanorobots. I'm not going to defend Kurzweil, but some less-sloppy thinkers have written about this kind of stuff, like Merkle, Freitas, and Drexler. E.g. http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMIIA/15.3.6.5.htm They do tackle questions like how do you power these things; I wish he'd read and criticize them instead. A 7-micron-long medical nanorobot sounds pretty damned big to me, btw -- in _Nanosystems_ Drexler fits a 32-bit CPU in a 400nm cube, less than 1/300 of the volume if we're talking about a 1-micron-radius cylinder.

A comment on the article's video had two interesting points: > There is linear stress problems that can occur, a single "activation" line (clock signal through a train of locks) can eventually reach a point that the mechanism will be unable to move at all. You can see an example of that long single activation line in this gif http://www.merkle.com/images/4_phase_shift_register_v4.gif and described in more detail in this part of the video: https://youtu.be/yVX9Ob4SjGA?t=769. I was surprised this wasn't explicitly addressed in the talk. Transistors aren't just powerful because they can be off or on (switch) but also because they can amplify signals (a lever). Edit: The paper does address this in section 4.5, saying that "The method for dealing with scaling is to isolate individual cells in a shift register (or more generally, individual clocked logic elements, such as Fredkin gates) by using the four-phase clock. That is, forces along signal lines cannot move beyond two cells before encountering a locked lock, preventing any accumulation of forces over long distances. At any point in time, a cell is either blocked from transmitting forces to adjacent cells, or can transmit forces only to one other cell (either the predecessor or the successor)" and "Force accumulation in link logic systems can be mitigated because each lock acts as a mechanical amplifier, with a small force controlling a much larger one." > I'm really loving the idea of mechanical logic gates and…

Related: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

Oh wow, basically its Chernobyl with wings. Don't miss this, its pure gold: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html Quote: "Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Pluto's sponsors were having second thoughts about the project. Since the missile would be launched from U.S. territory and had to fly low over America's allies in order to avoid detection on its way to the Soviet Union, some military planners began to wonder if it might not be almost as much a threat to the allies. Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."

I wouldn't pick this nit if my link wasn't so awesome [1]. Nuclear-powered aircraft are workable if you don't care about shielding. Who in their right mind would design a flying, unshielded nuclear reactor? A Cold War weapons designer who wanted to build: ... a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. The article at the other end of the link is the most tooth-curling engineer porn I've ever read. It's horrible. But also strangely awesome: Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.) [1] http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html