Michael Reilly: You run the Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What does "self-assembly" mean?
Skylar Tibbits: In general, self-assembly is a process by which disordered parts build into an ordered structure through simple interactions with each other. For example, we worked with Arthur Olson at the Scripps Research Institute to build a model of the polio virus. If you put the pieces of the model in a glass container, they just sit there. But when you impart some energy—shake the glass—they come together. Shake harder, and it comes apart again. You have these different states based on how much energy you put into the system; you don't control where every piece goes, it assembles itself.
4 comments:
Oh wow! This is crazy! At first I was really confused because I thought that the fourth detention was time so it did not really make any sense that someone was able to print that. Or that if someone had managed to, that it was not all over the news.
But I get why they are calling it that, and this seems like a really interesting project. Just being able to print shapes that have the ability to change shape seems like such an unreachable concept and now that it has been done, I am very interested to hear about what else they experiment with and discover as far as the capabilities of the machine. I am also curious as to what real life uses they will be able to find for the objects that they are now able to make. Off the top of my head I cannot really think of many practical uses, but perhaps once it becomes more popular it could be of use somewhere like the medical industry.
Woah, woah, woah, and woah. I know that is not a sentence, but WOAH. This is crazy.
First off, I also thought that the fourth dimension was time. I do understand why they are calling this "4-D" printing, but I didn't expect the "4-D" aspect to mean what they have said. Being able to print shapes that can alter their shape is amazing! This seems like something that I would never expect to be able to happen, but the developments that are being made in today's age are crazy! MIT, way to go!
This has been a long time coming, and still has a ways to go. I started hearing about nanotechnology almost ten years ago attending lectures here at CMU and they said it would take awhile. Too bad we are not there yet. This seems to work like lower level nano-tech, it can do some basic tasks but the problem which nano-tech has that they have not addressed is getting all the pieces to work together. Plenty of people have gotten to this point, creating basic objects with predetermined shapes. This becomes more useful when you can say "make me this specific car" and the nano-tech can figure out by cooperating with itself where each piece needs to go. This is not as cool as it appears to be at a glance. If they keep with it though maybe they will be the ones to get it all working.
I agree that the "4D" in the name is a little bit confusing, and although it does make sense in the way they are using the name, I think maybe they would have been better off choosing something else to avoid confusion. It seems like we are not quite there in terms of technology for 3D or 4D printing to be the next "industrial revolution," but we are definitely starting to get there. It's amazing to see what is being accomplished right here and right now. It will also definitely be interesting to see where all of this ends up taking us, and whether or not 4D printing will ever become commonplace.
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