There's Plenty
of Room at the Bottom: Richard Feynman's Big Dream for Small
Things
by
Kim Breitfelder
The field of nanotechnology is in
its infancy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a heritage.
And although nanotechnology's destination is widely debated
and largely uncertain, looking back at its historical roots — although relatively shallow — helps us get a
better grasp on what nanotechnology is, why it's important now,
and how it will change the world in the future.
The story of nanotechnology
(technology smaller than a nanometer, or one billionth of a meter)
begins in the 1950s and 1960s, when most engineers were thinking
big, not small. In an era of big cars, big bombs, big buildings,
and big plans for sending people into outer space, the
electronics industry began its ongoing love affair with making
things small. The invention of the transistor in 1947 and the
first integrated circuits in the late 1950s launched an era of
electronics miniaturization.
It was within that context that, on
29 December 1959, physicist Richard Feynman delivered a public
lecture, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." While
few took notice at the time, Feynman's words
are believed to have inspired the new field of nanotechnology.
Delivered at
the meeting of a local California chapter of the American
Physical Society, the talk opened with Feynman announcing that he had
identified what might someday be considered an entirely new
field — but not a field of technology. Although he called it a
field of physics — the study of matter — he went on to describe
what might more accurately be called a field of science-based
engineering.
In his lecture, Feynman described
something very curious: potentially writing an enormous amount
of text, perhaps the entire contents of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, in a space about the size of the head of a pin.
He described how this could be done using techniques available
to engineers in 1959. He further surmised that all the
information in every book in a library could theoretically
be converted to digital information and "stored" as "bits"
consisting of particles of just a few atoms each, built in two
different shapes to represent 0s and 1s. This would pack much
more information into an even smaller space, and Feynman
believed
that the entire contents of the world's great libraries could
fit in something the size of a dust mite. If information could
be condensed, Feynman then argued, so too could the information
machine, the computer. Perhaps not aware that the integrated
circuit had been invented earlier that year, Feynman suggested
that tiny computers could be made by fabricating all the
necessary wires and components using chemical techniques, to
form a small, solid "block" containing all the necessary
electronics.
But Feynman saw even more
interesting possibilities, not only in microelectronics but also in micromachines.
What if, he speculated, it were possible to construct tiny
machines specially designed to
perform some simple surgical operation inside the body? Medicine
would be revolutionized. In addition to micromachines, Feynman
also believed that constructing useful things could be done at
the atomic level, by manipulating individual atoms to arrange
them however the engineer or scientist wanted. Then, he
reasoned, compounds and chemicals for drugs or other purposes
could be easily manufactured, limited only by the imagination of the
chemist. Feynman closed with a challenge to engineers to
carry out some of the tasks he had mentioned, specifically
reducing printed information to a size that could only be read
with an electron microscope, and making a functional electric
motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch square.
A few months later, Engineering and
Science magazine published an account of the Feynman's
lecture. Despite the article and the fact that some of his
predictions for tiny computers were being realized in the form
of digital integrated circuits, Feynman's talk remained largely
forgotten for the next two decades. In the 1980s, physicist K. Eric Drexler
rediscovered the Feynman article, and he expanded on Feynman's
limited vision of tiny drills and lathes, microscopic toy
automobiles, pin-head encyclopedias, miniaturized computer
circuits, and customized chemicals. Drexler called his broader
approach "nanotechnology," but credited Feynman with the
inspiration.
Feynman's hypotheses and predictions
have often been misconstrued as a sort of vision of the future,
but his proposal was brief, vague and founded on the
technologies of the late 1950s. Nonetheless, he deserves credit
for recognizing one of the most important technological trends
of the late 20th century, one that promises to make the 21st
century very interesting.
This article is adapted from the
IEEE Virtual Museum exhibit, Small is Big: The Coming
Nanotechnology Revolution. To see the full exhibit, visit
www.ieee.org/museum.
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