A fun thought about nanotechnology that might only make sense to physicists: in terms of correlation function, CPUs are crystalline solids, but eukaryotic cells are liquids. I think a lot of people imagine future nanotechnology as made of solids, but given the apparent necessity of using diffusive transport, nanotechnology seems more likely to be statistically liquid.
(For non-physicists: the building blocks of a CPU are arranged in regular patterns even over long length scales. But the building blocks of a cell are just sort of diffusing around in a water solvent. This can be formalized by a “correlation function,” basically how correlated the positions of building blocks is—how much knowing the position of one lets you pin down the position of another. The position of transistors is correlated with each other over length scales as long as the size of the entire wafer of silicon, but the position of one protein in a cell tells you only a little bit about nearby proteins, and almost nothing about the position of proteins far away.)
A fun thought about nanotechnology that might only make sense to physicists: in terms of correlation function, CPUs are crystalline solids, but eukaryotic cells are liquids. I think a lot of people imagine future nanotechnology as made of solids, but given the apparent necessity of using diffusive transport, nanotechnology seems more likely to be statistically liquid.
(For non-physicists: the building blocks of a CPU are arranged in regular patterns even over long length scales. But the building blocks of a cell are just sort of diffusing around in a water solvent. This can be formalized by a “correlation function,” basically how correlated the positions of building blocks is—how much knowing the position of one lets you pin down the position of another. The position of transistors is correlated with each other over length scales as long as the size of the entire wafer of silicon, but the position of one protein in a cell tells you only a little bit about nearby proteins, and almost nothing about the position of proteins far away.)