Manipulating Matter

Recently, I read a research paper by Professor Manu Prakash from Stanford who has been working on a computer that works on fluid droplets and it is extremely fascinating.

Manipulating Matter

Inspiration: The computers that we have at our home are capable of manipulating Information, but they cannot manipulate Physical matter per se! Ergo, build a device that could process both information and physical matter simultaneously.

The setup is actually relatively simple to understand but the working is a bit tricky. They use a ferrofluid as the droplet and control the way it behaves with a circular magnetic field.

Through the coupling of magnetic and hydrodynamic interaction forces between droplets, AND,OR,XOR,NOT and NAND logic gates, fanouts, full adder, a flip flop and a finite state machine is implemented.

If this is the sort of thing that you are interested in, I strongly recommend you read their paper.

The bigger goal

“We already have digital computers to process information. Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers or to operate word processors on this,”

Prakash said. “Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter. Imagine if when you run a set of computations that not only information is processed but physical matter is algorithmically manipulated as well. We have just made this possible at the mesoscale.”

Have a great day!

- part of ‘Fluid Friday’ series

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