ABSTRACT
Feynman is also widely credited with inventing the eld of nanotechnology with a famous lecture, “ere’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” delivered at the 1959 meeting of the American Physical Society held at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. e “nano” in nanotechnology comes from the Greek word for “dwarf” and we use it in the scientic unit of length-the nanometer-which is 1 billionth of a meter or 40 billionths of an inch. An atom of silicon, the stu Intel makes computer chips from, is approximately a quarter of a nanometer in diameter. In his lecture, Feynman speculated on new technologies that would evolve from man’s ability to manipulate matter on such nanometer-sized atomic scales.4 Feynman declared, “And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide-which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom!”
