Science historical past: Richard Feynman provides a enjoyable little lecture — and desires up a wholly new subject of physics — Dec. 29, 1959

On a December day, Richard Feynman gave a enjoyable little lecture at Caltech — and dreamed up a wholly new subject of physics.

During the discuss, entitled “Plenty of room at the bottom,” he described the big potential that might be realized if scientists might manipulate and management issues at a “small scale.”

How small? Feynman went on to discount advances of the time, such as writing the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, as trivial.

“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,” Feynman said in his lecture. Rather, he suggested, people could write the entire 24-volume encyclopedia on the head of a pin, and elegantly showed that there’s enough space there to write it legibly and read it out.

He then explored the possibility of a number of then-futuristic ideas: electron microscopes capable of manipulating individual atoms, ultracompact data storage, miniaturized computers, and powerful, ingestible biological machines that travel into organs like the heart, find defects, and repair them with tiny knives. He proposed a number of ways to create these small-scale innovations, including manipulating light and ions.

He ended the lecture by offering a reward of $1,000 to anyone who could miniaturize the text in a book 25,000-fold, such that it could be read using an electron microscope. He offered another $1,000 to anyone who could make a motor no bigger than 1/64th of an inch cubed.

The latter of those prizes was scooped up the next yr by engineer William McLellan, who created a 250-microgram motor composed of 13 parts. In his award letter, Feynman congratulated McLellan on the feat however joked that he should not “start writing small,” lest he clear up the primary problem, too and anticipate to obtain the opposite $1,000 prize.

“I don’t intend to make good on the other one. Since writing the article I’ve gotten married and bought a house!” Feynman wrote.The former problem was ultimately solved in 1985, when Stanford graduate Thomas Newman miniaturized the first page of the Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities.” Feynman did, finally, pay up for the second prize.

Feynman’s Caltech discuss is now mythologized as having ushered within the subject of nanotechnology. And but, the time period “nanotechnology” itself was not coined till 15 years after his discuss, when scientist Norio Taniguchi penned a paper about manipulating materials on the atomic scale.

In that 1974 paper, Taniguchi described nanotechnology as “the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule.” Many science historians now argue that the sector was following its personal trajectory, and that Feynman’s talk, while prescient, wasn’t the actual driver of future innovations. Prior to 1980, his talk was cited less than 10 times.

Whether it drove innovation or not, since Feynman’s well-known lecture, a lot of his predictions have confirmed true. The scanning tunneling microscope manipulated particular person xenon atoms in 1990. Computers extra highly effective than he described now sit in our pockets, relatively than taking on entire rooms. And certainly, tiny nanobots have been designed that may restore broken blood vessels.