Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

July 24, 2019

From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair

Theoretically, would 3D printing ever be possible on a molecular level?

I think so. Something like this was an early objective of nanotechnology, but it was considered too difficult, and largely abandoned. Traditional synthetic chemistry tries to build molecules by applying a sequence of reactions that effectively transform the molecule. I have long thought there should be a direct way to build any molecule that’s stable. Biology does a restricted version of this using DNA and amino acids. But it’ll be extremely important when we can finally do it more generally. I’m guessing that one day we won’t just have computers; everything will be made of computers right down to the molecule scale.

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