There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom

There s Plenty of Room at the Bottom Richard P. Feynman 29 December 1959 [1]... 

Feynman, R.P. (1960) There s plenty of room at the bottom. Caltech Engineering el Science, 23 (5), 22-36, http //www.zyvex. com/nanotech/feynman.html. (last accessed 10 June 2010). 

The Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman described, in a lecture delivered in 1959, the future of miniaturization. The published version of his lecture is called There s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and in it can be found a recipe for putting the entire Encyclopedia Britan-nica on the very small head of a very small pin. Feynman s comments set into motion an entirely new area of study and have lead to what have become known as the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Chemists, physicists, materials scientists, and engineers have come together over the past several decades to produce with high accuracy and precision materials that have dimensions measured in nanometers (nm, 10 meters, about 1/100 000 the width of a human hair). Specifically, materials with one, two, or three dimensions of 100 nm or less (called, respectively, nanofilms, nanotubes, and nanoparticles) qualify as products of nanotechnology. It appears that almost any chemical substance that is a solid under ordinary conditions of temperature... 

Feynman, R. P. (1999) There s plenty of room at the bottom. In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Pages 117-140. Reprint of a talk delivered at Caltech in 1959. 

Atomic and molecular manipulation by means of STM or AFM represents the ultimate in size reduction for the fabrication and operation of nanodevices. Thus, in terms of size, there s plenty of room at the bottom as the celebrated aphorism of Richard Feynman goes [9.279]. However, the key word of supramolecular chemistry is not size but information and its route is towards complexity. Indeed, considering the ability of supramolecular species to spontaneously form from their components, bypassing microfabrication, and to accomplish intricate tasks on the basis of the encoded information and instructions, thus reaching higher levels of organization and behaviour, it is clear that through supramolecular chemistry there s even more room at the top ... 

Feynman, R. 1991. There s plenty of room at the bottom. Science, 254 1300-1. 

On December 29, 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman gave his classic talk entitled There s Plenty of Room at the Bottom (http.7/www.zyvex. com/nanotech/feynman.html). In it, he suggested that ordinary machines could build smaller machines that could build still smaller machines, working step by step down toward the molecular level. To quote, The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. ... 

The explosion of interest that followed the identification of buckminsterfullerene, CgO) by Kroto and co-workers in 1985 [1] has yet to subside. Together with the discovery of related fullerenes and buckytubes, the isolation of heralded the start of a new chapter in the now ubiquitous field of nanotechnology. Like nanotechnology, which dates from Feynman s There s plenty of room at the bottom lecture to the American Physical Society in 1959 [2], the identification of Q,o s soccer ball shape can also be traced back to an earlier origin, Osawa s paper in 1970 [3]. 

Way back in the middle of the last century (1959, to be more specific), Nobel Laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman gave an after-dinner talk ( There s Plenty of Room at the Bottom ) that challenged scientists to explore the uncharted realms of nanotechnology. He observed that the limits to miniaturization were truly reached only at the level of molecules and atoms. Among his wonderfully prescient, and typically bold, speculations was the following thought ... 

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