Feynman's 1959 talk launched the idea of nanotechnology

Person: Richard Feynman
Lived: 1918–1988
Field: Physics
From: American

The story

On 29 December 1959 Richard Feynman gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, held at the California Institute of Technology. Its playful full title was There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics. The New Scientist reported that the scientific audience was captivated. Feynman spoke without prepared notes, and a tape recording made by an admirer allowed Caltech to publish an edited transcript in its Engineering and Science magazine in February 1960.

In the talk Feynman considered how the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica might be written on the head of a pin, and estimated that the contents of all the world's books could fit in a cube about 0.13 millimetres wide if the information were stored in three dimensions. He argued that the laws of physics did not prevent us from arranging atoms one by one the way we want. He imagined miniaturised machines building smaller copies of themselves, denser computer circuits, microscopes far more powerful than the electron microscopes of his day, and even a tiny surgical robot that a patient might swallow, an idea he credited to his friend Albert Hibbs. He also noted that devices at the atomic scale would be governed by quantum mechanics. He ended by offering two $1,000 prizes for miniaturisation challenges.

For years the talk attracted little notice. Interest grew sharply in the early 1990s, after K. Eric Drexler cited it in his 1986 book Engines of Creation and nanotechnology became a recognised field. Several of Feynman's ideas were later realised in the scanning tunnelling microscope, the atomic force microscope and other probe instruments that can image and move individual atoms.

The lecture became one of the most cited founding documents of nanotechnology. When President Bill Clinton announced the National Nanotechnology Initiative in a speech at Caltech in January 2000, he quoted Feynman's question about arranging atoms one by one. In 2016 researchers at TU Delft paid tribute by storing a paragraph of the talk in a memory where each bit was made from a single missing atom.

Feynman is now widely credited with introducing the concept of nanotechnology, decades before scientists had the tools to see and move individual atoms. His talk gave a young field both an early starting date and an inspiring vision of what might be possible.