On this day in 1959, physicist Richard Feynman gave his lecture Theres plenty of room at the bottom in which he speculated that in the future it would be possible to directly manipulate individual atoms. Although the lecture, held at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, didnt make much impact at the time (I couldnt find any reference to it in our archive), it did do so in the 1990s, when the newly created field of nanotechnology was trying to develop a history of its development. Feynman, who spelled out his thinking on the difficulties and opportunities awaiting researchers on the nanoscale with his usual clarity, issued two challenges in his talk in which he promised to pay $1000 to the first researchers who could do the following: Construct a tiny motor (won by William McLellan in 1960 using traditional machinery) and secondly, reduce the size of letters to fit the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin. This latter challenge was finally won by Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, in 1985 when he successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities. The talks popularity (in terms of citations) rose in the 1990s when researchers and politicians looked to fund nanotechnology and needed a high profile figure to attach to the field. Feynmans talk was re-assessed and like many of the speculations the physicist was interested in, turned out to be fairly prophetic. You can read his talk at its.caltech.edu/~feynman/plenty.html Editors update: One historian (thank you Patrick McCray) pointed out that there is a Physics Today issue in which you can read more about the lecture and its influence. Its behind the firewall, so only accessible if your institution has a subscription or youre a member of an AIP member society or subscriber.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 18:37:08 +0000
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