Hacking Matter

Fülszöveg

The flick of a switch: A wall becomes a window becomes a hologram generátor. Any chair becomes a hypercomputer, any rooftop a power or waste treatment plánt.
Programmable matter is probably not the next technological revolution, nor even perhaps the one after that. But it's coming, and when it does, it will change our lives as much as any invention ever has. Imagine being able to program matter itself— to change it, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, from paper to stone, from fluorescent to super-reflective to invisible. Supported by organi-zations ranging from Levi Strauss and IBM to the Defense Department, solid-state physicists in labo-ratories at MIT, Harvard, Sun Microsystems, and elsewhere are currently creating arrays of micro-scopic devices called "quantum dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and then can be changed, as fast as an electrical signal can... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The flick of a switch: A wall becomes a window becomes a hologram generátor. Any chair becomes a hypercomputer, any rooftop a power or waste treatment plánt.
Programmable matter is probably not the next technological revolution, nor even perhaps the one after that. But it's coming, and when it does, it will change our lives as much as any invention ever has. Imagine being able to program matter itself— to change it, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, from paper to stone, from fluorescent to super-reflective to invisible. Supported by organi-zations ranging from Levi Strauss and IBM to the Defense Department, solid-state physicists in labo-ratories at MIT, Harvard, Sun Microsystems, and elsewhere are currently creating arrays of micro-scopic devices called "quantum dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and then can be changed, as fast as an electrical signal can travel, to have the properties of a different atom. Soon it will be possible not only to engineer into solid matter such unnatural properties as variable mag-netism, programmable flavors, or exotic chemical bonds, but alsó to change these properties at will.
Wil McCarthy visits the laboratories and talks with the researchers who are developing this extraor-dinary technology; describes how they are learning to control its electronic, optical, thermal, mag-netic, and mechanical properties; and telis us where all this will lead. The possibilities for how we live and work are truly magical. Vissza