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Drexler had some handwavy estimates of energy dissipation in his designs for nanosystems. I'd like to check if these are correct.
Drexler estimated nanotech systems could operate efficiently at GHz speeds, rapidly constructing large amounts of material, or efficiently run dense reversible computation orders of magnitude higher performance than we have now. But how efficient these systems are depends chiefly on heat dissipation, which is where Drexler’s critics made the strongest objections. Some recent experiments showed he overestimated compute cooling by about 3 orders of magnitude. And new modes of heat dissipation have been discovered at the nanotech scales.
So it would be worthwhile to go over Drexler's calculations with modern knowledge of heat dissipation and correct his work. That requires going through some gnarly calculations involving phonons and reading a bunch of papers to get some empirical data to pin down key parameters in calculations.
To fund myself reading papers (say, 100 hours of time at $75 per hour) and buy AI credits to help with some calculations. ($500 worth for highest cost Claude and OpenAI subscriptions.)
Me, Astra and Claude. I did a masters involving energy thermal phonon calculations, and Astra and Claude need no introduction. I have also lead a reading group reading through Drexler's Nanosystems which includes a couple of people working in the field.
It turns out that some parameters are too gnarly to calculate from first principles and we don't have good enough data to estimate them for the systems Drexler is concerned with.
None for myself.