I remember reading engines of creation in my second year of uni and then asking Andre Geim for a summer placement - he said no, he was busy, and then a few months after he got the Nobel prize. Instead I went to the material science school and got a summer project playing with the old tunneling electron microscope in the basement. it felt like flying a 747, given how many buttons, levers and knobs you had to tune to get a good picture of nanotubes. They also showed me their state of the art AFM but I wasn't allowed to breathe near it.

Pushing atoms around by mechanical means only seems plausible if you've never really studied molecular chemistry - see the Drexler/Smalley debate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate...

It’s a good debate. I tend to agree with Ray K’s commentary.