Wait. What?
Dutch?
Physics?
Or a Saint?
Oh.
Never mind.
From the Foresight Institute:
Physicists suppress 'stiction' force that bedevils microscale machinery
Whether or not MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) technology has
use as a development path toward productive nanosystems, or atomically
precise manufacturing, is unclear (see for example this series of posts on the Feynman Path
by J. Storrs Hall), the problem of stiction in microscale mechanical
systems has been used as a canard to criticize proposals for mechanical
molecular machine systems. (For why this criticism is unfounded, see section 6.3.7 of Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines.)
Nevertheless, MEMS is in its own right a very useful technology so it
is gratifying to see that a solution to the stiction problem may be in
sight. A hat tip to Dale Amon for pointing to this physics archive blog
article “US Nuclear Weapons Laboratory Discovers How to Suppress the Casimir Force“:
The Casimir effect causes microscopic machines to stick fast. Now
physicists have successfully tested a way to suppress this force
The Casimir effect is a strange and mysterious force that operates on
the tiniest scales. It pushes together small metal objects when they are
separated by a tiny distance.
That’s a problem because engineers are increasingly interested in
building tiny machines with parts that move against each other on
precisely the scale. For some years now, they’ve been thwarted by a
problem called stiction in which the tiny cogs, gears and other parts in
these machines stick together so tightly that the device stops working....MORE
