fbaube@NOTE.NSF.GOV.UUCP (12/04/87)
People have been casting about for nanotech applications. The current EE Times says that most of the new superconductors are materials that are a jumble of crystalline structures, and that the superconducting may be occurring along the inter-crystal faults. This would explain their fragility and the difficulty of reproducing results. If this *is* the mechanism, a nanotech engineer would devise/design/program a "constructor" to build atoms into crystals up to a certain size, and then piece together these tiny crystals into a macro structure where they are not at an orientation where they can further coalesce into a larger crystal, but rather, where intercrystal faults are created in accordance with design parameters. I apologize for imprecisions in the use of terminology.