Room at the Bottom, Plenty of Tyranny at the Top

Aµer his landmark presentation “¡ere’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” given to the American Physical Society on December 29, 1959, Richard Feynman was generally regarded as one of the fathers of nanotechnology. Feynman had extended an invitation for “manipulating and controlling things on a small scale, thereby entering a new ¢eld of physics which was bottomless, like low-temperature physics.” He started with the question, can we “write the Lord’s prayer on the head of a pin,” and immediately extended the goal to the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Feynman showed that there exists no physical law against the realization of such goals by a gedankenexperiment: If you magnify the head of a pin by 25,000 diameters, its surface area is then equal to that of all the pages in the Encyclopedia Britannica.