Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

the catom unique is that you can change the charge on each of its electrodes, so that catoms bind to each other in different orientations. With one set of charges, these cubes might combine to create a large cube. Change the charges on each cube’s electrode, and then the catoms disassemble and quickly rearrange themselves into an entirely different shape, such as a boat.
    The point is to shrink each catom to the size of a grain of sand, or even smaller. If one day silicon-etching techniques allow us to create catoms that are as small as a cell, then we might be able to realistically change one shape into another, simply by pushing a button. Justin Rattner, a senior fellow at Intel, says, “ Sometime over the next forty years, this will become everyday technology.” One immediate application would be for automobile designers, airline engineers, artists, architects, and anyone who has to design three-dimensional models of their projects and then continually modify them. If one has a mold of a four-door sedan, for example, one can grab the mold, stretch it, and it suddenly morphs into a hatchback. Compress the mold a bit more and it turns into a sports car. This is far superior to molding clay, which has no memory or intelligence. Programmable matter has intelligence, can remember previous shapes, adapt to new ideas, and respond to the designers’ wishes. Once the mold is finalized, the design cansimply be e-mailed to thousands of other designers, who can then create exact copies.
    This could have a profound effect on consumer products. Toys, for example, can be programmed to change shape by inserting new software instructions. So for Christmas, one need only download the software for a new toy, reprogram the old toy, and an entirely new toy appears. Children might celebrate Christmas not by opening presents under the tree but by downloading software for their favorite toy that Santa has e-mailed them, and the catoms making up last year’s toy become the hottest thing on the market. This means that a wide array of consumer products may eventually be reduced to software programs sent over the Internet. Instead of hiring a truck to deliver your new furniture and appliances, you may simply download the software off the net and recycle your old products. Renovating homes and apartments won’t be such a chore with programmable matter. In your kitchen, replacing the tiles, tabletops, appliances, and cabinets might simply involve pushing a button.
    In addition, this could cut down on waste disposal. You don’t have to throw out many of your unwanted things if you can simply reprogram them. If an appliance or piece of furniture breaks, you have only to reprogram it and it becomes new again.
    Despite its enormous promise, there are also numerous problems facing the Intel team. One is how to orchestrate the movements of all these millions of catoms. There will be bandwidth problems when we try to upload all this information into the programmable matter. But there are also shortcuts one can take.
    For example, in science fiction movies it is common to see “morphing,” that is, one person suddenly changing into a monster. This used to be a very complex, tedious process to create on film, but can now be done easily by computer. First, you identify certain vectors that mark different key points on the face, such as the nose and eyes, for both the human and the monster. Each time a vector is moved, the face changes gradually. Then computers are programmed to move these vectors, from one face to the next, thereby slowly changing one face into another. In the same way, it might be possible to use shortcuts when shape-shifting a 3-D object.
    Another problem is that the static electrical forces between the catoms are weak when compared to the tough interatomic forces that hold mostsolids together. As we have seen, quantum forces can be quite powerful, responsible for the tough properties of metals and the elastic properties of plastic. Duplicating these quantum forces with static electrical forces to ensure that these products remain stable is going to be an issue in the future.
    I had a chance to witness firsthand the remarkable, rapid advances in programmable matter when I took a Science Channel film crew to visit Seth Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon University. In his laboratory you could see large stacks of cubes scattered all over a table in various sizes, each with chips inside. I saw two of these cubes bound tightly