Won thermal fluctuations damage nanomachines?
As mentioned in the answer above, room temperature thermal energy will jiggle atoms around on average by about 4 * 10-21 Joules. But atomic bond energies are on the order of 1 electron volt (eV). If we translate all the mentioned energy units to electron volts, so smaller exponents come into play, we get this set of energy ranges: * ~ 0.00004 eV QM sigmaE for carbon confined to 1 Angstrom. * ~ 0.025 eV average thermal energy at room temperature (~293 K). * ~ 1 eV order of magnitude for typical molecular bond strengths. So the average fluctuations would not break a typical molecular bond. However, because some fluctuations are well above the average, some damage will occur. Further details on the rate at which this damage occurs may be found in K. Eric Drexler’s text “Nanosystems”. Generally the rate would be low enough to be tolerable for many systems and self-repair mechanisms would be needed for systems where damage is less tolerable.
