Nanotechnology:

Grey goo or great God?

CiS-St Edmund’s Templeton Lecture
Cambridge, 10th March 2005
 What is nanotechnology?

• Nanoscience is the study of phenomena and manipulation

of materials at atomic, molecular and macromolecular
scales, where properties differ significantly from those at a
larger scale.

• Nanotechnologies are the design, characterisation,

production and application of structures, devices and
systems by controlling shape and size at nanometre scale.

Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties.

The Royal Society & The Royal Academy of Engineering, 2004.
Length scales

Nanotechnology
 Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman

• MONSIEUR JOURDAIN

Well, what do you know about that! These forty

years now, I've been speaking in prose without
knowing it! How grateful am I to you for teaching
me that!
Nanofabrication: ion beam milling
 Key historical event: 1990

Eigler writes IBM with individual Xe atoms.

How small can computers get?
 The world’s smallest test tube
Pulsed ESR

Rabi period 64 ns

A nitrogen atom can be put Spin coherence time T2 > 0.24 ms,
into a C60 fullerene cage. giving many ESR Rabi oscillations.

2 nm

Incar-fullerenes can be put in a carbon nanotube to

make an array of qubits (www.nanotech.org).
 The world’s smallest test tube

5 nm

A. Khlobystov et al. Angewandte

Chemie International Edition
43, 1386-1389 (2004 “hot paper”)
Do we see God’s hand in natural nanotechnology?
The amazing design of natural nanotechnology
 Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

1968: Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel,

“Fantastic Voyage ” is made into a movie
starring Racqel Welch.

… the only woman in the crew of a

miniaturized submarine which is
injected into the blood stream of a
defecting scientist in order to melt an
inoperable blood clot in his brain
Sources of confusion about nanotechnology
2003: “Agent Cody Banks”

His mission:
befriend fellow teen Natalie in
order to gain access to her
father, a scientist unknowingly
developing a fleet of deadly
nanobots for the evil
organization ERIS.
 Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

1986: Eric Drexler, publishes Engines of Creation, The Coming

Era of Nanotechnology.
 Nanotech will destroy the world
• As engines of destruction, nanotechnology and AI systems will lend
themselves to more subtle uses than do nuclear weapons. A bomb can
only be used to blast things but nanomachines and AI systems could
be used to infiltrate, seize, or control a territory or a world.
Drexler, Engines of Creation, 1986, p. 174

• The nightmare is that combined with genetic materials and thereby

self-replicating, these nanobots would be able to multiply themselves
into a “gray goo” that could outperform photosynthesis and usurp the
entire biosphere, including all edible plants and animals.
American Spectator, February 2001

• Grey goo is a wonderful and totally imaginary feature of some

dystopian sci-fi future in which nanotechnology runs riot, and
microscopic earth-munching machines escape from a laboratory to eat
the world out from under our feet.
Guardian, July 2001
 Sources of confusion about nanotechnology

Jack discovers his wife's firm has created

self-replicating nanotechnology--a literal
swarm of microscopic machines. Originally
meant to serve as a military eye in the sky,
the swarm has now escaped into the
environment and is seemingly intent on
killing the scientists trapped in the facility

“Drawing on up-to-the-minute scientific fact, Prey takes us

into the emerging realms of nanotechnology and artificial
distributed intelligence–in a story of breathtaking
suspense.”
Prey 2002: dust jacket
Sources of confusion about nanotechnology
2003: Tabloid headlines:
“Prince Charles fears grey goo nightmare.”

2004: Says he was misrepresented … that he does

not believe in self-replicating nanotechnology.
 Belief paradigms
• Agnostic. One who holds that the existence of anything beyond
material phenomena cannot be known (OED). Thomas Henry
Huxley (1825-95), cf. Acts 17:23.
– Benjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol), “In this university we speak Latin,
not Greek; the Latin for agnostic is ignoramus.”
• Atheism. Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God. “A
little superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind
of man to atheism.” Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
• Deism. Belief in the existence of a God, with rejection of
revelation: ‘natural religion’. “Deism being the very same with
old Philosophical Paganism” Richard Bentley (1662-1742).
• Theism. Belief in a deity or deities, as opposed to atheism.
Belief in one God as creator and supreme ruler of the universe,
without denial of revelation; in this use distinct from deism.
 Belief paradigms

creator sustainer

agnosticism
? ?
atheism
 
deism
 
theism
 
The exquisite structure of
biomolecular systems enables
their optimum function.
What is the origin of this?
Creation or Design
or Apparent Design?
Paley said that if you find
a watch there must be a
watchmaker.
Intelligent design

Chapter 1. LILLIPUTIAN BIOLOGY

This book is about an idea–Darwinian

evolution–that is being pushed to its
limits by discoveries in
biochemistry…. When sciences such
as physics finally uncovered their
foundations, old ways of
understanding the world had to be
tossed out, extensively revised, or
restricted to a limited part of nature.
Will this happen to the theory of
evolution by natural selection?
 Belief paradigms

What we cannot
All observed explain “caused by
phenomena God”

GOD
“…a universe with no edge in space, no beginning
or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.”

Carl Sagan (foreword to A Brief History of Time)

What we can
explain
“caused by
science”
Are we to “play at God” with nanotechnology?
 The Cavendish Laboratory
The great oak doors opening on the site of the original building had
carved on them, by Maxwell's wish, the text from Psalm 111 Magna
opera Domini esquisira in ornnes coluntares ejus. Shortly after the
move to the new buildings in 1973 a devout research student suggested
to me that the same text should be displayed, in English, at the entrance.
I undertook to put the proposal to the Policy Committee, confident that
they would veto it; to my surprise, however, they heartily agreed both to
the idea and to the choice of Coverdale’s translation, inscribed here on
mahogany by Will Carter. There is a legend that when Rayleigh wished
the same text to stand at the beginning of the six volumes of his
Collected Papers, the Cambridge University Press demurred, on the
ground that some readers might misunderstand who was the Lord
referred to.

Professor Sir Brian Pippard FRS, Eur. J. Phys. 8 (1987) 231-235.

 Let us make man in our image
‫ נַ ֲעׂשֶה ָאדָ ם ְּב ַצ ְלמֵנּו ּכִדְ מּותֵ נּו‬,‫וַּי ֹאמֶר אֱֹלהִים‬
Gen 1:27
• Refers to whole man (not just intellect etc.)
• Means predominantly a duplicate, a clone
• Refers upward to relationship with God
– “Mankind is created to stand before God.” Claus Westermann, Creation.
– “Personhood is bestowed on him as the distinctive characteristic of his
nature.” Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament.
• Refers downward to relationship to creation
– Man is God’s executive, to take responsibility for the world. von Rad
– “Man himself is the image of God, who has no image of his own.” Clines
• Includes the concept of accountability
– “Perhaps the most satisfying of the interpretations of the meaning of the
image of God in man is that which sees it as basically responsibility.”
C.F.D Moule, Man and Nature.
 The physical nature of information


And the word flesh became
John 1:14

 = the controlling principle of the universe

()
 The physical nature of information
• Could this concept of ‘information’ be defined in sufficiently precise
terms for scientific purposes? … What information technology has
brought into being as a self-conscious discipline in this century is a
new level of causal analysis additional to the classical level of physics.
In the level of control-analysis you have … a flow of information.
Donald MacKay, Behind the Eye (1991)

• … there is an irreducible interdependence between cognitive and

neural processes calling for a duality of description but without
necessitating belief in a dualism of substances.
Malcolm Jeeves, CiS conference 2003
(Science & Christian Belief, 2004)

• The “take-home” message of what Malcolm presented is that we need

to re-think body-soul (or body-mind) dualism in favor of some form of
monism, wholism, or physicalism.
Warren S. Brown, 2004 ASA/CSCA Annual Conference
 The physical nature of information
• Information theory and statistical mechanics
The great advance provided by information theory lies in the discovery that
there is a unique, unambiguous criterion for the “amount of uncertainty”
represented by a discrete probability distribution, … we will consider the
terms “entropy” and “uncertainty” as synonymous.
E.T. Jaynes (1957)

• Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal

quantum computer
The reason why we find it possible to construct, say, electronic calculators,
and indeed why we can perform mental arithmetic, cannot be found in
mathematics or logic. The reason is that the laws of physics ‘happen to’
permit the existence of physical models for the operations of arithmetic
such as addition, subtraction and multiplication. … In this section I present
a general, fully quantum model for computation.
David Deutsch (1985)
 The physical nature of information

• Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a

physical representation. It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet, a
spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper, or some other
equivalent. This ties the handling of information to all the possibilities and
restrictions of our real physical world, its laws of physics and its
storehouse of available parts. … the mere possibility of quantum
parallelism has changed theoretical computer science permanently.

• Our scientific culture normally views the laws of physics as predating the
actual physical universe. … In the beginning was the Word and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1), attests to the belief.

Rolf Landauer (1996)