Meeting notice: The 06-01-99 meeting will be held at 7:30 
p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block 
down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new 
and can't recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably 
know where we are. 


Suggested topic: simulators and technological change

Over the last twenty-five years simulators have been used to 
explore a growing list of problem spaces, such as circuit 
design, stress analysis, and fluid dynamics.  Where this 
tool works at all, it works very well indeed; the success of 
integrated circuits testifies to that.  However, there are 
many fields, such as cell biology, where simulation is not 
only not possible now but not likely to be so for some time 
to come.  

The difference between these two categories can be 
significant. Innovation in simulatable fields seems to run 
faster and more flexibly and to be easier to forecast and 
otherwise manage. All things being equal, one would expect 
talent and investment money to prefer a field of that sort 
to its alternative. Thus one can speculate that 
simulatability is a leading indicator of technological 
promise, perhaps more useful as such than such characters as 
market size, financial commitment, conceptual clarity, or 
public enthusiasm. 

For instance, everyone can see reasons why biotech ought to 
be a major winner in the tech game: it plays to large, 
motivated markets in agriculture and medicine and has a 
great many targets to shoot at, some of which have 
considerable social resonance (curing cancer; feeding the 
third world).  By contrast, MEMS, while a reasonably fertile 
field (see http://www.ida.org/MEMS/links.html for a master 
list of MEMS developers and Principal Investigators*) has no 
high-profile problems or solutions, other perhaps than that 
of developing a new kit of semi-autonomous highly local 
surgical tools. These will of course be welcome, but they 
are unlikely to be seen as changing the essential character 
of the time, the way biotech and nanotech are expected to.

Nonetheless, MEMS are simulatable while biotech is not. That 
reason alone suggests that the technology, humble as it 
might be, is likely to blow right by biotech over the next 
ten years. Similarly, it might follow that directions to
nanotech that can be pursued with simulators are far more
likely to work out -- to be the actual vehicles of the 
technology -- than those that can not.


*also, from the last announcement: http://www.isi.edu/efab/   

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Worth Noting Though It Has Nothing To Do With Nanotechnology Dept.

Douglas Hoyt, an atmospheric physicist at Hughes, is the 
author (with Kenneth Schatten) of a short but incredibly 
impressive book titled "The Role of the Sun in Climate 
Change".  If you read one book on this subject in your life 
this should be it. Now Hoyt has put together a terrific site 
on greenhouse warming, analyzing all the data out there. 
Nuanced, sophisticated, erudite, and focussed.  If you only 
look at one site on the topic, etc.

http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1. 



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Announcement Archive:
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