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Comment by pgboswell | Hacker News Reader

For sure - at least with the parts in their current form. A simple flip-flop takes up a minimum space of about 30 cm x 30 cm. But I wonder how small these parts could get. Like, what if spintronics was invented in the 19th century instead of the 21st century? Would Moore's law have applied to mechanical transistors?

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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_th... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation

TL;DR we're nowhere close to exploiting the full potential of nanoscale mechanical systems.

For those who don't click on the Engines of Creation link, be aware that at the bottom of that page is a PDF link to the gratis version of Engines of Creation 2.0 from 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20140810022659/http://www1.appst...

Since I just now learned about that link, I haven't read the book to know, but I have always been interested in finding out if the ability to create smaller and smaller machines is possible by having an outer machine which manufactures an inner, smaller, copy of itself, apply the process of induction, define the termination criteria, ..., profit!

Or, maybe I'm thinking about the problem all wrong -- it's not the actual construction machinery that's the problem, it's providing the input materials to each step (gears, levers, fasteners, wiring(?), etc)

There's a Factorio-clone hiding in this problem ...

The issue is that scaling does not produce linear effects as you go down (or up) for a number of reasons. What works at the meter scale doesn’t work at the millimeter scale, which doesn’t work at the micrometer scale, etc.

So you end up having to learn an experiment at a more and more difficult to access scale to figure out how to make something actually work.

That’s real life anyway.

MEMS started out to cater to this dream, unfortunately problems like stiction (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/stiction) have been blockers until now.

the reality is that it turned out to be easier to make things with lithography, and we don't need to pantograph our way to the bottom (whew!).

Many cell phones now have sensors that are mems-based, built using lithography (accelerometers being the best example). In many senses, we've started to achieve the goals of the book.