[CWC]

Much of our advancement in nanotechnology has enabled the possibility of producing varying allotropes of carbon; more noticebly, the buckminster fullerene. It does not stop here, however. Our study of the behavioural changes of matter under different physical conditions linked to atom-atom interactions on the quantum scale has provided a leap in advancement of nanotechnology since the very early 1950s, and further boostered by rapid progress of discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics.

Would it be remotely possible in the near future where everything all physical and objectifiable could be constructed bottom-up, atom by atom, into the desired matter?

[Vagrant]

Strikes me as unlikely.

Machinery on the atomic level would be incapable of distinguishing different atoms. The machinery would at least need to be about the size of a virus in order to distinguish atoms and handle them. So, it would certainly be small, but not atomic level.

I bet we could build things on the cellular level in the next 100 years though.

[SirJac]

I believe the trick in most of nanotechnology is self assembly, since manual construction is too tedious and time consuming for anything other then research purposes. As a result, not everything can be constructed bottem up economically. Perhaps this will change if we find a way to make some sort of von Neumann nanomachine, but that is an entire discussion unto itself.

Instead I believe nanotechnology is more geared towards finding "recipes" for self assembly that results in something useful. Nylon is a really simple and old example of this sort of idea, but new materials like carbon nanotubes are really a much more advanced application of the same idea of self assembly. So while it may not be possible to make everything from the bottem up, the stuff that we can make often has some really interesting properties and I can't begin to speculate what sort of materials will be developed in the future.

[DewFuel]

Doubtful, the quantum effects and nanoscale properties of materials are lost when they approach the bulk (macro) size scales.

For semiconductor materials like CdSe, the critical size limit is around 7nm, anything larger, and the material behaves as if it were a 10 pound slab of CdSe.