Question: can you clone things

Oliver Gordon answered on 6 Mar 2019:

Unfortunately, I can’t, no. One of the key laws of physics is that mass can’t be created or destroyed. It’s also the same with energy – You can’t make/destroy it, you can only move it around.

One of the things we do do though in my group is make atoms build themselves into massive structures. Although we can move them about one at a time, if we want a big material with very specific properties, it would be very time consuming! Instead, we do a lot of supercomputer based simulation to figure out how to “trick” them into doing the work for us and turning themselves into a shape we desire.

Could you extend that to having an army of nanobots able to build whatever you want? Probably not in our lifetimes, sadly 🙁