THERES PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE BOTTOM

This speech was given by Richard Feynman on 29 December 1959 at the Annual American Physical Society meeting. This text is provided with permission from the Engineering and Science magazine, published quarterly by the California Institute of Technology (http //www.pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/). 

I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense of, What are the strange particles ) but it is more like solid-state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most important is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications. What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale. 

As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that s nothing that s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction. 

Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica 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 head of the pin is then equal to 

---