Daedalus (was Re:The Prometheans -- The Promethean Institute...)

Gregory Sullivan (sullivan@blaze.cs.jhu.edu)
Sun, 23 Nov 1997 15:18:31 -0500 (EST)

Damien Broderick said:
>*Daedalus*, BTW, is the title of a long-established journal of
>science and the arts, as well as the pseudonym of a witty scientist
>who once had a weekly column in *New Scientist* and later moved, I
>think, to *Nature*. His ideas were not a million miles from the wild
>& wacky stuff that appears on this list, although under his own name
>he famously lambasted Drexler's nanotech. (Ref'd in Ed Regis's NANO!
>I think, but since the fiend hasn't included an index...)

Daedalus (David E. H. Jones) did lambaste nanotechnology while
reviewing Regis's book Nano! Thus, Regis's book (at least the first
edition) predates the criticism and could not refer to it, barring
temporal peculiarities.

The reference is:
"Technical boundless optimism," by David E. H. Jones, Nature,
Vol. 374, No. 6525, April 27 1995, pages 835-837.

A response to the Jones review was created by Ralph Merkle and is
available on the web together with responses to other critics:
http://nano.xerox.com/nanotech/nanocritics.html

While attending the Foresight conference, I asked Ralph Merkle if Jones
had replied to the cogent points contained in Merkle's commentary and he
said that Jones had not replied.

Gregory Sullivan