There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Delivered at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech on December 29, 1959, Feynman envisioned the field of nanotechnology decades before its physical realization.
Full Transcript
I imagine experimental physics as a frontier where we keep pushing toward higher energies or larger cosmic scales. But I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle: the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.
As soon as I mention this, people ask: ‘Why couldn’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?’
Let’s see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the pinhead equals the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All that is needed is to reduce the size of all writing by a factor of 25,000.
The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.
There is plenty of room at the bottom.
Defining Key Excerpts
"The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom."
"What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale."
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