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by pimlottc 885 days ago
Do you mean this general sort of speculative wording or these specific applications? If so, why these applications and not others?
1 comments

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”