Quantum engineering
Tony Hey, Patrick Walters · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2003
What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale…. 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. Richard Feynman Richard Feynman and nanotechnology In 1959, in an after dinner speech at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Pasadena, Richard Feynman set out a remarkable vision of the future in a talk entitled ‘There's plenty of room at the bottom.’ The talk was subtitled ‘an invitation to enter a new field of physics’ and marked the beginning of what is now known as ‘nanotechnology’. Nanotechnology is concerned with the manipulation of matter at the scale of a nanometre -a thousand millionth of a metre. Atoms are typically a few tenths of a nanometre in size. Feynman emphasized that such an endeavour does not need new physics: I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven't yet gotten around to it. In his talk Feynman offered two prizes of $1000 each – one ‘to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor which is only 1/64 inch cube’, and a second ‘to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25000 smaller’ He had to pay out on both prizes – the first less than a year later, to Bill McLellan, a Caltech alumnus.