[i-use-nixos-btw]

> While no immediate practical applications exist, the researchers envision enhanced efficiency in micromotors, microscale cargo transport, and materials that can self-assemble or self-repair.

Everyone who has ever written a grant application will recognise this wording.

[gumby]

> Everyone who has ever written a grant application will recognise this wording.

And then when they see the university publicity department article on the topic everyone will know that the wild claims on how it will revolutionize the future started out as a reluctant and hedged "practicality" sentence.

When a university pub office sends something out about a new theorem in pure math, the absurd "applications" claims are even funnier.

[ptcrash]

Would you care to share for those of us who haven’t written a grant application before?

[epgui]

It’s the biggest stretch possible without it being technically dishonest. Everyone knows it: the researchers know it and gag a little as they write it, and the grant reviewers know it but pretty much require it without really ever saying that they require it (competitive landscape and all).

[fuzzfactor]

What else can you say when it gets to subject matter like this?

In experimental thermodynamic bench experiments, those who are familiar with boiling water in a common scientific vessel such as a tea kettle, are often familiar with how a system has its own characteristic rate of cooling, depending on the energy of the heated media to dissipate into whatever heat exchange facility is available at the time, usually ambient convection.

Under careful observation it can be seen that often it is possible to impart energy from an external source at a faster rate than the same amount of energy will later require to completely dissipate afterward.

People shouldn't be discouraged whether this is obvious or not.

Experimentation such as this can require quite a bit of dedication, especially among those who are not tea drinkers, but this is the workaround that would be required to arrive at such valid conclusions without the use of equations nor those pesky optical tweezers which are such a pain in the butt.

[jdksmdbtbdnmsm]

it exhibits a capacity to be full of shit with a straight face, which makes grant funders happy so grant reviewers view it as job security

[epgui]

No, it’s not the same thing as “being full of shit”. You took a nuance and you turned it into a carnival.

The incentive structures you hint at don’t make sense either.

[marcosdumay]

The writer can not imagine any realistic application for the foreseeable future. But hey, nothing is impossible.

[foobarbecue]

... lots of things are impossible?

[leoqa]

name an impossible thing and a grant writer will propose a solution

[NoZebra120vClip]

Could God write a grant proposal so ambitious that He couldn't fund it?

[Kerb_]

Looking at how churches collect tithes, I wonder if He already has

[coldtea]

Not when fishing for grants.

[lelandbatey]

I'm curious what the meaning behind the recognition is. Is it "this has applications potentially anywhere!"

Is it actually code for "very dangerous military applications, DARPA please pay attention to me!"

[epgui]

It’s code for: we are really interested in continuing to research this and we believe it’s important (for reasons that nobody will really understand apart from the other 5-6 world experts), so we are making this statement as much of a marketing stretch as possible without it being technically dishonest.

Getting research funding is just a brutally competitive game.

[koolba]

It’s code for: We’re not sure what it can do, but throw some more money at us and we’ll eventually tell you!

[jacquesm]

In lots of published papers there is some kind of call-out for the requirement of future research.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=more...

A sentence like that or a variation thereof is part of the 'dance' around funding.

[Jweb_Guru]

It's code for "this is important and useful to the world, but probably won't lead to any immediately practical applications from the perspective of the funders (economically, militarily, etc.). But we have to say it might or we won't get funded."

[lupire]

Swarm of killer robots.

[pimlottc]

Do you mean this general sort of speculative wording or these specific applications? If so, why these applications and not others?

[i-use-nixos-btw]

Yes and yes.

These applications specifically because anything that looks at anything on the micro scale includes these as “possible applications”. They sound cool and exciting, and the urge for making them has been around since before Feynman’s Room At The Bottom lecture.

But my comment is mainly surrounding the farce of making a cool discovery that progresses an area of understanding, and then being asked a question that is best posed to engineers: “but what can we do with it?” Wrong field, wrong people, wrong question.

Imagine if astrophysicists were asked these questions. “So you’ve discovered a new kind of star that is made entirely of sponge? What applications do you think will come out of this research?” “Well we hope it will help with Dyson Spheres, Astrology and sea navigation”

[spacebacon]

Meh, if self-assembling, self-repairing materials forming a swarm of nano bots was going to take over the world it would have already happened elsewhere in the universe and proliferated everywhere by now. instead we have biology. The actual dominate force in our dimension that did proliferate.

[labster]

Do you have any evidence that us biologicals are not an outlier other than the anthropic principle? Maybe our solar system is in the machines’ nature preserve sector.

[spacebacon]

Nope, strictly by objective evidence we are alone as you know.

Our “dimension” the one unique to our perception and interpretation on Earth is dominated by biology.

I don’t see an artificial system being able to sustain a supply chain long enough to defeat that. The supply chain of biology is inherit.

[emmo]

How do you know it hasn't and isn't slowly making its way here? Universe is a big ol' boy.

[BobaFloutist]

Why would that apply to synthetics but not to biologicals?

[spacebacon]

Ecosystem vs synthetic supply chain.

[wredue]

Erm so?

No tech would ever be developed or furthered without exploring possibilities. Huge swathes of process and tech is developed purely on just trying things.

HNs recent anti-science propaganda is getting pretty out of hand.

[bowsamic]

But the point is that it's a lie, they have no intention to actually try those things. They only say them because as a society we do not give material support to physics for the sake of physics, instead we demand that it has some kind of economic value. Therefore physicists are incentived (or, really, forced) to oversell the reach of their ideas, since governments believe knowledge is not good in itself, it's only really good if there's some whiff that it may give a political or economic edge. All scientists in the world are used to pandering to this, so that they can be left alone and actually work. Unfortunately it seems to be getting more and more intense as time goes on, and as economies contract.