Dr. Richard Feynman

Dr. Feynman's Small Idea

October / November 07 Volume 5 Number 5

Print this Article

E-mail this Article

"I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously—€¦.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."
--Richard Feynman

Dr. Feynman's Small Idea

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the title of a famous lecture given by Richard Feynman, physicist and Nobel Laureate, in 1959. Feynman talked about the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. He considered a number of interesting ramifications of a general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale and was particularly interested in the possibilities of denser computer circuitry and microscopes that could see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscopes. These ideas were later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope, the atomic force microscope and other examples of probe microscopy and storage systems.

Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation, and he presented the "weird possibility" of building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop. This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in perhaps a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations. This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1940 short novel Waldo. As the sizes got smaller, we would have to redesign some tools because the relative strength of various forces would change.

He concluded his talk with challenges to build a tiny motor and to write the information from a book page on a surface 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale. He offered prizes of $1,000 for each challenge. Amazingly, his motor challenge was quickly met by a meticulous craftsman using conventional tools; the motor met the conditions, but did not advance the art. In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford grad student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by 1/25,000, and collected the second Feynman prize.

K. Eric Drexler later took the Feynman concept of a billion tiny factories and added the idea that they could make more copies of themselves, via computer control instead of control by a human operator, in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which was the first use of the term.
Please see Page 28 for excerpts from Feynman's 1959 talok.

What is Nanotechnology?

Nanotechnology is an emerging and promising field of research, loosely defined as the study of functional structures with dimensions in the 1 to 1,000 nanometer range. Certainly, many organic chemists have designed and fabricated such structures for decades via chemical synthesis. During the last decade, however, developments in the areas of surface microscopy, silicon fabrication, biochemistry, physical chemistry and computational engineering have converged to provide remarkable capabilities for understanding, fabricating and manipulating structures at the atomic level.
Research in nanoscience is exploding, both because of the intellectual allure of constructing matter and molecules one atom at a time, and because the new technical capabilities permit creation of materials and devices with significant societal impact. The rapid evolution of this new science and the opportunities for its application promise that nanotechnology will become one of the dominant technologies of the 21st century. Nanotechnology represents a central direction for the future of chemistry that is increasingly interdisciplinary and ecumenical in application.

—€”Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University