We still don’t know the precise mechanism by which the cuprate high temperature superconductors work. It’s pretty clear it has something to do with constraining electrons to a near-two-dimensional structure, but the details are not understood. It seems entirely probable that by studying these materials and others, such as LK-99, that exhibit anomalous properties, we’ll eventually figure out what is going on to cause superconductivity and then be able to design materials to obtain the properties we want, assuming physics permits them.
The number of arrangements of atoms in a material is effectively infinite and although chemists and material scientists are extraordinarily clever at figuring out how to make structures self-assemble, this represents only an infinitesimal fraction of the possible structures that could be assembled which are chemically and mechanically stable. When we are able to simulate the behaviour of arbitrary structures from ab initio quantum mechanics (which is one of those problems where quantum computing can be put immediately to work for a huge gain in performance) and assemble the structures we design atom-by-atom, as Richard Feynman envisioned in 1960,
But it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible (I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. Give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed – a development which I think cannot be avoided.
This is what molecular nanotechnology is all about and, sooner of later, if we wish to continue to increase the power of our computing devices by scaling them down so they run faster and use less power, that’s the technology we’re eventually going to arrive at. When we get there, it would be surprising if we couldn’t make all kinds of things that natural processes cannot construct.
Here is a talk I gave in 1990 at the Autodesk Technology Forum “What Next? The Coming Revolution in Manufacturing”. As usual, I was (way) early in my predicted dates and over-optimistic in the rate of technological progress (at this epoch, I was just becoming dimly aware of the extent to which academic and national laboratory research in the U.S. was a giant taxpayer-funded trough at which, with rare exceptions, not-very-bright hogs fought for their places for that sweet, sweet government gruel). This became pellucidly evident when the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was launched in 2000, only to be immediately hijacked by the swine squad to fund things that had nothing to do with its purported goals, which was achieved by redefining the word “nanotechnology” to mean things nobody had ever used it for previously. Almost a quarter of a century later, NNI still exists, having spent more than US$ 36 billion, essentially none of it on nanotechnology as defined before its creation.
