How itty-bityty is itty-bitty?

[vaskidmark]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/news/how-small-is-small-the-nanoscale-explained-in-one-chart-16200082?click=pm_latest

Neat chart.  Too bad they can not get smaller.  Or can they?

stay safe.

[AJ Dual]

The ability to do useful work pretty much falls off at the scale of molecules. Although an individual molecule can act as a cage or a frame for an individual atom to flop back and forth in. Which might provide the fundamentally smallest way to store a binary 0 or 1 possible.

Sub-atomic units are pretty much already doing all that they're going to do by the laws of physics, unless you shotgun them into each other at fair fractions of c in particle colliders and then they fly around for a bit before recombining or fading out and that tells physicists interesting things about the way the universe works. So the idea of a sub-atomic "machine" or device is kind of a non-concept.

Good news is that there's TONS of room down at the molecular level to do all sorts of stuff we can't even imagine yet, assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the process. 

Although it would be nice if we could somehow figure out a way to uncouple matter/mass from the Higgs Boson field, and not have said matter explode or otherwise lose it's other fundamental properties or structure. That would be handy. (you would only need to overcome air resistance to get into space for an example...)

Although the Higgs wasn't even postulated yet, E.E. Doc Smith had a lot of his handwavium tech. in his Lensman books based on that idea.

[zahc]

The binding energy of the electron in a hydrogen atom (13.6eV iirc) is commonly used in information theory as the minimum energy required to store a bit of information. By extrapolation, you can calculate the theoretical efficiency of computers (which is dismal) and how much energy would be required to run certain algorithms.

[birdman]

The binding energy of the electron in a hydrogen atom (13.6eV iirc) is commonly used in information theory as the minimum energy required to store a bit of information. By extrapolation, you can calculate the theoretical efficiency of computers (which is dismal) and how much energy would be required to run certain algorithms.

Modern NAND flash is quite close (within 10x) that limit for the actual storage.  The access/word line changes require orders of magnitude more, but the fact that the actual number is quite low is amazing.

Though, I disagree with that as a limit, as there are lower energy transitions that could be exploited at the molecular level.  Reconfiguration of molecules (eg energy difference between cis- and trans- molecules for instance is less than the electronic transition you mention).

Nano-scale molecular mechanics could even be less.  A better number would be some multiple of kT.

[CNYCacher]

Modern NAND flash is quite close (within 10x) that limit for the actual storage.  The access/word line changes require orders of magnitude more, but the fact that the actual number is quite low is amazing.

Though, I disagree with that as a limit, as there are lower energy transitions that could be exploited at the molecular level.  Reconfiguration of molecules (eg energy difference between cis- and trans- molecules for instance is less than the electronic transition you mention).

Nano-scale molecular mechanics could even be less.  A better number would be some multiple of kT.

Welcome back.

[230RN]

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