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I was thinking recently how there used to be about a lot of talk about waldos and nanotechnology. I think the idea was to build a Waldo that can assemble a 1/10th scale Waldo, repeat and voila you are soon building nano scale contraptions. It’s a very intriguing idea, seemingly not practical though.

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Its operation at each scale would be very different, and it's not obvious how many different layers we'd need before we'd be at the smallest possible, but maybe.

Technically we already can go from human scale to nano or even atomic scale in "one operation". i.e. a scanning tunneling microscope you etch a tungsten wire in acid and then can go and look at individual carbon atoms at room temperature.

An atomic force microscope is even more direct - while not absolutely "atomic" - you can definitely with a sharp enough tip push things around on the nanoscale.

The problem is definitely as you note: things do in fact behave very differently when you're doing that.

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