----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Allsop" <allsop@fc.hp.com>
To: <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 9:34 AM
Subject: First step toward uploading?
>
>
> Extropians,
>
> There's a great pointer on www.nanodot.org to info about a
> grant that his being given to Brown University to fund a project using
> nano devices to study, probe, and communicate with the brain on the
> neuron scale.
I wonder if "femtochemical movies" could help.
See Coherent Thinking:
http://broccoli.caltech.edu/EngineeringAndScience/articles/zewail/zewailtxt.html
<<In order to shoot bonds in sharp focus, you need a shutter speed faster than
the fastest atomic motion. Explains Zewail, "A femtosecond is shorter than the
period of any nuclear vibration or rotation in the molecule, so we are able to
freeze the system in time. The atoms in the molecules inside you are vibrating
at about a kilometer per second, and they're so tiny that we measure their
relative positions in a unit called the angstrom, which is 10-10 meters-one
ten-billionth of a meter. A typical chemical bond is a few angstroms long. If
you combine these numbers, you see it takes about 100 femtoseconds for an atom
to move an angstrom. So we have to be substantially faster than that to catch
them in the act." And then there's the daunting task of getting all the
molecules in step. When Eadweard Muybridge took his groundbreaking stop-motion
photos of a galloping horse in 1887, one horse was ridden past a row of a dozen
cameras. But each of Zewail's photographs contains millions of molecules, as if
Muybridge had run a whole herd of horses in lock step past one camera. Even when
they are undergoing the same reaction, molecules don't run in lock step, so how
do you synchronize their gaits? >>
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