{"id":410,"date":"2007-05-12T08:29:19","date_gmt":"2007-05-12T16:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/12\/femtotech-weapons\/"},"modified":"2012-04-05T15:47:06","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T23:47:06","slug":"femtotechweapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/12\/femtotechweapons\/","title":{"rendered":"Femtotech Weapons"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about having some direct matter control in Hylozoic<\/em>. I\u2019ve written about this before, calling it femtotechnology. It was in Freeware <\/em>first, and then I worked out the science for it in Saucer Wisdom<\/a><\/em>. Here\u2019s a long quote about femtotech from Saucer Wisdom<\/em>, a scence featuring my old characters Harry Gerber and Joe Fletcher.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[Begin quote from Saucer Wisdom<\/em>.]
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

We\u2019re early in the year 3001, looking in on the founder of femtotechnology, a dumpy guy with thick lips and a slobbering way of talking. He\u2019s telling his plans to a tall skinny assistant who has a little tuft of curly hair. Their names are Harry and Joe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to invent femtotechnology now,\u201d\u009d sloppy Harry is saying. \u201cTo make a long story short.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cSay what?\u201d\u009d says curly-top Joe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll explain it again,\u201d\u009d says Harry. \u201cFirst of all, here\u2019s the official prefixes for small numbers.\u201d\u009d A radiotelepathically projected chart appears in the minds of Harry, Joe, and the eavesdropping Frank.<\/p>\n

Name *** Numerical Symbol *** Prefix<\/b><\/p>\n

Thousandth *** 0.001 *** Milli-
\nMillionth *** 0.000001 *** Micro-
\nBillionth *** 0.000000001 *** Nano-
\nTrillionth *** 0.000000000001 *** Pico-
\nQuadrillionth *** 0.000000000000001 *** Femto-
\nQuintillionth *** 0.000000000000000001 *** Atto-
\nSextillionth *** 0.000000000000000000001 *** Zepto-
\nSeptillionth *** 0.000000000000000000000001 *** Yocto-<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cYawn yawn, I\u2019ve seen that,\u201d\u009d says Joe.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeen but not understood,\u201d\u009d says Harry. \u201cTo grasp the meaning of the word \u201d\u02dcfemtotechnology,\u2019 you should first think about the word \u201d\u02dcnanotechnology.\u2019 A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. An big molecule might be ten or twenty nanometers across, maybe a little more. A water molecule is smaller, about a fifth of a nanometer. Nanometers are a natural size-unit for measuring molecules, so when people developed the technology for manipulating molecules they called it nanotechnology.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen how come the dooks who work with molecules say they\u2019re doing wetware engineering?\u201d\u009d asks Joe.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a historical accident,\u201d\u009d says Harry. \u201cThe original nanotechnologists \u2014 we\u2019re talking about nearly a thousand years ago \u2014 thought they were going to be making tiny machines. But that idea turned out to be bogus. Biology has the lock on nanometer-scale fabrication. The word \u201d\u02dcnanotechnology\u2019 died because the first guys to use it had some wrong ideas. It\u2019s sort of like the way the alchemists thought substances had philosophical virtues, and then a few centuries later it turned out they\u2019d been trying to do chemistry. The old-time nanotechnologists thought molecules were like machines, and then a few centuries later it turned out they\u2019d been trying to do wetware engineering. Nobody wants to be branded an alchemist or a nanotechnologist because those original groups were wrong in important ways. But my point, Joe, is that wetware engineering is indeed nanotechnology. It\u2019s what\u2019s going on when you use medi-germs to clean out your arteries. It\u2019s what\u2019s happening when a diamond-spider spins carbon fibers for construction. It\u2019s what happens when a cloth-plant weaves cellular automaton fabric for your shirts.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t hurt yourself, man,\u201d\u009d says Joe. \u201cYou\u2019re explaining too hard. Try this one: according to the chart, picotechnology should come before femtotechnology. Why don\u2019t we do picotechnology first?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThere isn\u2019t much happening at the picometer size scale,\u201d\u009d says Harry. \u201cThe next really solid thing below molecules is the nucleus of an atom. And that turns out to be about twenty femtometers. So if we start doing things directly to atomic nuclei we\u2019re talking about femtotechnology<\/em>. There isn\u2019t going to be any picotechnology because there\u2019s nothing interesting that\u2019s a picometer in size.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cVery clean,\u201d\u009d say Joe. \u201cFemtotechnology. I\u2019m down with it, brah. But what are we going to do <\/em>to the atoms?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cTransmute them, Joe. Dirt into gold. Gold into water. Water into air. Air into chicken soup. Making stuff out of \u201d\u02dcthin\u2019 air is quite practical, you know. Air has more mass than people realize. A cubic meter of it weighs a kilogram. The air in your bedroom weighs about as much as your body.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut how does transmutation work?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cTransmutation is mostly a matter of changing protons into neutrons and vice-versa. An atom\u2019s nucleus is a bunch of protons and neutrons. Take oxygen, it\u2019s got eight neutrons and eight protons. And hydrogen has one proton. If you could change protons into neutrons, you could stick sixteen hydrogens together, flip half of their protons to neutrons and you\u2019d have a molecule of oxygen. Like that. And by the way, when you change the nuclei, the electrons take care of themselves.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/p>\n

[Here’s an amazing video of femtotech transmuatation from the far-out video site Flight 404<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

\u201cBut how do you change a proton into a neutron? Smash it or something?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the crude old nuclear physics way. Instead of that, we femtotechnologists are going to use quark-flipping. <\/em>Takes much less energy. What\u2019s quark-flipping? A proton is a quark-bag holding two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a quark-bag with two down quarks and one up quark. To change from one to the other, you just need to go into the bag and flip the one quark.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cAren\u2019t there other kinds of quarks, too?\u201d\u009d asks Joe. \u201cBesides up and down?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cStrange quarks,\u201d\u009d says Harry, smiling wetly. \u201cWe\u2019ll get to those later, my man. But first we need to get the femtotechnology matter transmuter working.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you want to call it?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d\u009d says Harry. \u201cHorne O\u2019 Planty? Spelled weird to make it a trademark, you understand. Or maybe a Polish Knife? My mother\u2019s people are Polish. Or call it an alef? Or maybe a cradle or a loom?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow about an alla<\/em>,\u201d\u009d says Joe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like it,\u201d\u009d says Harry after a moment\u2019s thought. \u201cAlla. Fine. Now what\u2019s still missing, Joe?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow to make it work is what\u2019s missing.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cIncommensurable magnitudes,\u201d\u009d says Harry. \u201cWe\u2019ll use three titanium bars of slightly different irrational lengths. The square root of two, the cube root of three, and the fifth root of five will work. Each bar will have a matter-lens that grows quark whiskers, and the whiskers will embody a one-dimensional nonlinear wave pattern that tells them where to turn. The whiskers will split and grow along all the edges of a parallelopiped control volume. Within this box we\u2019ll use a chaotic cascade to fuse all the nucleons\u2019 quark-bags into a quark-gluon plasma that we\u2019re free to flip, shuffle and regroup. The process will be directed by high-level user request patterns made via a custom-designed radiotelepathic uvvy which incorporates low-level implementation instructions for a few thousand basic substances. You can help with that part, Joe. And in our commercial release, the control uvvy can act as a carrying case. The alla!\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cWavy,\u201d\u009d says Joe. \u201cI\u2019m there, dude.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

[End quote from Saucer Wisdom<\/a><\/em>.]
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I want some cool weapons. I need to think of what they do and give them fairly simple names.<\/p>\n

The stonker<\/b>. The target gets cold and frosty then falls apart. Could be that it damps atomic vibrations or, funnier, the atomic silps are too stoned to hold together—Sonic mentions a thing like this in Chap 1. Not sure of the name of this weapon. Devibrilizer looks too much like \u201cdevil.\u201d\u009d Vibrilizer is backwards. Nuller sound Star Trek. Stonker. I like stonker, it sounds like stoner, stomper, stink and stalk.<\/p>\n

The klusper<\/b>. Amps up atomic vibes, overloads the atoms with Gaian information flow, they heat up and explode into plasma. Klusper like crisper.<\/p>\n

The gobble gun<\/b>. Looks like a hollow barber pole. Is always sucking some air in front and sending it out the back. Crank it up to full power, and it inhales everything in front of it, empties out a cylindrical tube about a kilometer long and a meter wide, turns the matter into a tidy black coil of degenerate-matter in back, like the sh*t-vein of a shrimp. At first I wanted to call it the gomper gun, which sounds funnier, gomper like gopher and Gomer. But gobble gun is so much easier to understand.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about having some direct matter control in Hylozoic. I\u2019ve written about this before, calling it femtotechnology. It was in Freeware first, and then I worked out the science for it in Saucer Wisdom. Here\u2019s a long quote about femtotech from Saucer Wisdom, a scence featuring my old characters Harry Gerber and Joe Fletcher. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3913,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions\/3913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}