wildcat

Richard Feynman's There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959): "Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation, and he presented the 'weird possibility' of building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop. This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in perhaps a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations."

I'm not sure I understand the "Van der Waals forces" -- I'll need to ask Michael about that at some point. For some reason "dispersion forces" refer to particle attraction rather than the opposite, but I might not be reading carefully enough.