Plenty of Room at the Bottom

On December 29, 1959, Richard Feynman stood before the American Physical Society at Caltech and delivered a lecture titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." He proposed that machines could be built at the molecular scale. Atoms could be arranged one by one. Entire encyclopedias could be written on a pinhead. He wasn't describing science fiction. He was describing physics that was already possible in principle but hadn't been attempted in practice.

Feynman offered two prizes: $1,000 for the first person to build a working electric motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch on a side, and $1,000 for anyone who could shrink a page of text by 25,000 times. The motor prize was claimed within a year. The text prize took until 1985.

The lecture is considered the founding vision of nanotechnology, though the term wasn't coined until 1974 by Norio Taniguchi. Feynman's insight was that the laws of physics don't prohibit manipulation at atomic scales. The barriers were engineering challenges, not fundamental limits. Given enough precision, you could build machines atom by atom.

hypothetical nanotechnology model. source: wikimedia commons

Today, nanotechnology is used in medicine, materials science, and electronics. Drug delivery systems target individual cells. Carbon nanotubes are stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight. The transistor showed what happened when you made electronic components small. Feynman imagined what happened when you made everything small.

Feynman's lecture wasn't a prediction. It was a permission slip. He told a room full of physicists that the very small was not off-limits. The bottom had plenty of room. They just had to go there.