There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Encyclopedia
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the title of a lecture given by physicist
Richard Feynman
at an American Physical Society
meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atom
s as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry
than those used at the time.
circuitry, and microscope
s which could see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscope
s. 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 such as Millipede
, created by researchers at IBM.
Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to make nanoscale machines that "arrange the atoms the way we want", and do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation.
He also presented the "weird possibility" of "swallowing the doctor," an idea which he credited in the essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs
. This concept involved 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. He uses the analogy of a pantograph
as a way of scaling down items. This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein
in his 1942 story Waldo.
As the sizes got smaller, one would have to redesign some tools, because the relative strength of various forces would change. Although Gravity would become unimportant, surface tension would become more important, Van der Waals
attraction would become important, etc. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during his talk. Nobody has yet attempted to implement this thought experiment, although it has been noted that some types of biological enzymes and enzyme complexes (especially ribosomes) function chemically in a way close to Feynman's vision.
, which, to Feynman's surprise, was achieved by November 1960 by William McLellan
, a meticulous craftsman, using conventional tools. The motor met the conditions, but did not advance the art. The second challenge involved the possibility of scaling down letters small enough so as to be able to fit the entire Encyclopædia Britannica
on the head of a pin, by writing the information from a book page on a surface 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale. In 1985, Tom Newman
, a Stanford graduate student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities
by 1/25,000, and collected the second Feynman prize.
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
.
After Feynman's death, scholars studying the historical development of nanotechnology
have concluded that his actual role in catalyzing nanotechnology research was limited, based on recollections from many of the people active in the nascent field in the 1980s and 1990s. Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, has reconstructed the history of the publication and republication of Feynman’s talk, along with the record of citations to “Plenty of Room” in the scientific literature. In Toumey's 2008 article, "Reading Feynman into Nanotechnology", he found 11 versions of the publication of “Plenty of Room", plus two instances of a closely related talk by Feynman, “Infinitesimal Machinery,” which Feynman called “Plenty of Room, Revisited.” Also in Toumey’s references are videotapes of that second talk.
Toumey found that the published versions of Feynman’s talk had a negligible influence in the twenty years after it was first published, as measured by citations in the scientific literature, and not much more influence in the decade after the Scanning Tunneling Microscope was invented in 1981. Subsequently, interest in “Plenty of Room” in the scientific literature greatly increased in the early 1990s. This is probably because the term “nanotechnology” gained serious attention just before that time, following its use by Drexler in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
, which cited Feynman, and in a cover article headlined "Nanotechnology", published later that year in a mass-circulation science-oriented magazine, OMNI
. The journal Nanotechnology was launched in 1989; the famous Eigler-Schweizer experiment, precisely manipulating 35 xenon atoms, was published in Nature in April 1990; and Science had a special issue on nanotechnology in November 1991. These and other developments hint that the retroactive rediscovery of Feynman’s “Plenty of Room” gave nanotechnology a packaged history that provided an early date of December 1959, plus a connection to the charisma and genius of Richard Feynman.
Toumey’s analysis also includes comments from distinguished scientists in nanotechnology who say that “Plenty of Room” did not influence their early work, and in fact most of them had not read it until a later date.
Feynman's stature as a Nobel laureate and as an iconic figure in 20th century science surely helped advocates of nanotechnology and provided a valuable intellectual link to the past. More concretely, his stature and concept of atomically precise fabrication played a role in securing funding for nanotechnology research, illustrated by President Clinton January 2000 speech calling for a Federal program:
Feynman was also known for his talks in low level science classes. He would ask to teach these classes, which would then be attended by graduate students, or even professors. His unique teaching style allowed him to take incredibly complicated subjects and transform them into a series of lectures that even his rudimentary physics students were capable of comprehending and applying.
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...
at an American Physical Society
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...
meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atom
Atom
The atom is a basic unit of matter that consists of a dense central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. The atomic nucleus contains a mix of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons...
s as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
than those used at the time.
Conception
Feynman considered a number of interesting ramifications of a general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. He was particularly interested in the possibilities of denser computerComputer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
circuitry, and microscope
Microscope
A microscope is an instrument used to see objects that are too small for the naked eye. The science of investigating small objects using such an instrument is called microscopy...
s which could see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscope
Scanning electron microscope
A scanning electron microscope is a type of electron microscope that images a sample by scanning it with a high-energy beam of electrons in a raster scan pattern...
s. These ideas were later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope
Scanning tunneling microscope
A scanning tunneling microscope is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer , the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. For an STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and...
, the atomic force microscope
Atomic force microscope
Atomic force microscopy or scanning force microscopy is a very high-resolution type of scanning probe microscopy, with demonstrated resolution on the order of fractions of a nanometer, more than 1000 times better than the optical diffraction limit...
and other examples of probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede
IBM Millipede
Millipede is a non-volatile computer memory stored on nanoscopic pits burned into the surface of a thin polymer layer, read and written by a MEMS-based probe...
, created by researchers at IBM.
Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to make nanoscale machines that "arrange the atoms the way we want", and do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation.
He also presented the "weird possibility" of "swallowing the doctor," an idea which he credited in the essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs
Albert Hibbs
Albert Roach Hibbs was a noted mathematician known worldwide as "the voice of JPL". He was born in Akron, Ohio on October 19, 1924 and died on February 24, 2003 of complications following heart surgery....
. This concept involved 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
Massively parallel
Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life sciences, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself,...
operations. He uses the analogy of a pantograph
Pantograph
A pantograph is a mechanical linkage connected in a special manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen...
as a way of scaling down items. This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
in his 1942 story Waldo.
As the sizes got smaller, one would have to redesign some tools, because the relative strength of various forces would change. Although Gravity would become unimportant, surface tension would become more important, Van der Waals
Van der Waals force
In physical chemistry, the van der Waals force , named after Dutch scientist Johannes Diderik van der Waals, is the sum of the attractive or repulsive forces between molecules other than those due to covalent bonds or to the electrostatic interaction of ions with one another or with neutral...
attraction would become important, etc. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during his talk. Nobody has yet attempted to implement this thought experiment, although it has been noted that some types of biological enzymes and enzyme complexes (especially ribosomes) function chemically in a way close to Feynman's vision.
Challenges
At the meeting, Feynman concluded his talk with two challenges, and he offered a prize of $1000 for the first individuals to solve each one. The first challenge involved the construction of a tiny motorNanomotor
A nanomotor is a molecular device capable of converting energy into movement. It can typically generate forces on the order of piconewtons.A proposed branch of research is the integration of molecular motor proteins found in living cells into molecular motors implanted in artificial devices...
, which, to Feynman's surprise, was achieved by November 1960 by William McLellan
William McLellan (nanotechnology)
William Howard McLellan was an American electrical engineer.In December 1959, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered two challenges relating to nanotechnology at the annual meeting of the Americal Physical Society, held that year at Caltech, offering a $1000 prize to the first...
, a meticulous craftsman, using conventional tools. The motor met the conditions, but did not advance the art. The second challenge involved the possibility of scaling down letters small enough so as to be able to fit the entire Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
on the head of a pin, by writing the information from a book page on a surface 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale. In 1985, Tom Newman
Tom Newman (scientist)
Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford University in 1985, was one of the two people to solve one of a pair of challenges put forth by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in 1959, in a talk titled "There's Plenty of Room at the...
, a Stanford graduate student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature....
by 1/25,000, and collected the second Feynman prize.
Impact
K. Eric DrexlerK. Eric Drexler
Dr. Kim Eric Drexler is an American engineer best known for popularizing the potential of molecular nanotechnology , from the 1970s and 1980s.His 1991 doctoral thesis at MIT was revised and published as...
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
Engines of Creation
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology is a 1986 molecular nanotechnology book written by K. Eric Drexler with a foreword by Marvin Minsky. An updated version was released in 2007...
.
After Feynman's death, scholars studying the historical development of nanotechnology
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...
have concluded that his actual role in catalyzing nanotechnology research was limited, based on recollections from many of the people active in the nascent field in the 1980s and 1990s. Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, has reconstructed the history of the publication and republication of Feynman’s talk, along with the record of citations to “Plenty of Room” in the scientific literature. In Toumey's 2008 article, "Reading Feynman into Nanotechnology", he found 11 versions of the publication of “Plenty of Room", plus two instances of a closely related talk by Feynman, “Infinitesimal Machinery,” which Feynman called “Plenty of Room, Revisited.” Also in Toumey’s references are videotapes of that second talk.
Toumey found that the published versions of Feynman’s talk had a negligible influence in the twenty years after it was first published, as measured by citations in the scientific literature, and not much more influence in the decade after the Scanning Tunneling Microscope was invented in 1981. Subsequently, interest in “Plenty of Room” in the scientific literature greatly increased in the early 1990s. This is probably because the term “nanotechnology” gained serious attention just before that time, following its use by Drexler in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
Engines of Creation
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology is a 1986 molecular nanotechnology book written by K. Eric Drexler with a foreword by Marvin Minsky. An updated version was released in 2007...
, which cited Feynman, and in a cover article headlined "Nanotechnology", published later that year in a mass-circulation science-oriented magazine, OMNI
Omni (magazine)
OMNI was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction...
. The journal Nanotechnology was launched in 1989; the famous Eigler-Schweizer experiment, precisely manipulating 35 xenon atoms, was published in Nature in April 1990; and Science had a special issue on nanotechnology in November 1991. These and other developments hint that the retroactive rediscovery of Feynman’s “Plenty of Room” gave nanotechnology a packaged history that provided an early date of December 1959, plus a connection to the charisma and genius of Richard Feynman.
Toumey’s analysis also includes comments from distinguished scientists in nanotechnology who say that “Plenty of Room” did not influence their early work, and in fact most of them had not read it until a later date.
Feynman's stature as a Nobel laureate and as an iconic figure in 20th century science surely helped advocates of nanotechnology and provided a valuable intellectual link to the past. More concretely, his stature and concept of atomically precise fabrication played a role in securing funding for nanotechnology research, illustrated by President Clinton January 2000 speech calling for a Federal program:
Feynman the teacher
There was also a version of this talk, with the same name, that Feynman gave to high school students. One place that it was given was Los Angeles High School, in about 1960, to a group of fifty selected high school physics students.Feynman was also known for his talks in low level science classes. He would ask to teach these classes, which would then be attended by graduate students, or even professors. His unique teaching style allowed him to take incredibly complicated subjects and transform them into a series of lectures that even his rudimentary physics students were capable of comprehending and applying.