Feynman imagines the nanoworld

On December 29, 1959, physicist Richard Feynman delivered a now-legendary lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society held at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman asked a deceptively simple question: why can’t we work at far smaller scales? He imagined writing all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, building machines that arrange matter atom by atom, and shrinking computers to microscopic size. To spur others on, he offered two $1,000 prizes — one for a tiny electric motor, won within a year by Caltech’s William McLellan.

“There’s plenty of room at the bottom.”

The talk drew little attention at the time and was first printed in Caltech’s Engineering and Science in 1960. Yet by the 1980s it was widely hailed as the conceptual birth of nanotechnology, a field whose name didn’t even exist when Feynman spoke. His vision of controlling the very small still frames how scientists think about the atomic frontier.