"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more robust form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. Versions of the talk were reprinted in a few popular magazines, but it went largely unnoticed until the 1980s. The title references the popular quote "There is always room at the top." attributed to Daniel Webster (who is thought to have said this phrase in response to warnings against becoming a lawyer, which was seen as an oversaturated field in the 19th century).
Conception Feynman considered some ramifications of a general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. He 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 scanning probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede. 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 possibility of "swallowing the doctor", an idea that he credited in the essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs. This concept involved building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot. As a thought experiment, he proposed developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands controlled by the hands of a human operator, 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 tools because the relative strength of various forces would change. Gravity would become less important, and Van der Waals forces such as surface tension would become more important. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during his talk. Nobody has yet attempted to implement this thought experiment; some types of biological enzymes and enzyme complexes (especially ribosomes) function chemically in a way close to Feynman's vision. Feynman also mentioned in his lecture that it might be better eventually to use glass or plastic because their greater uniformity would avoid problems in the very small scale (metals and crystals are separated into domains where the lattice structure prevails). This could be a good reason to make machines and electronics out of glass and plastic. At present, there are electronic components made of both materials. In glass, there are optical fiber cables that carry and amplify light. In plastic, field effect transistors are being made with polymers, such as polythiophene that becomes an electrical conductor when oxidized.
Challenges At the meeting Feynman concluded his talk with two challenges, and offered a prize of $1000 for the first to solve each one. The first challenge involved the construction of a tiny motor, which, to Feynman's surprise, was achieved by November 1960 by Caltech graduate William McLellan, a meticulous craftsman, using conventional tools. The motor met the conditions, but did not advance the field. 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. Newman's thesis adviser, R. Fabian Pease, had read the paper in 1966, but it was another graduate student in the lab, Ken Polasko, who had recently read it who suggested attempting the challenge. Newman was looking for an arbitrary random pattern to demonstrate their technology. Newman said, "Text was ideal because it has so many different shapes."
Reception The New Scientist reported "the scientific audience was captivated." Feynman had "spun the idea off the top of his mind" without even "notes from beforehand". There were no copies of the speech available. A "foresighted admirer" brought a tape recorder and an edited transcript, without Feynman's jokes, was made for publication by Caltech. In February 1960, Caltech's Engineering and Science published the speech. In addition to excerpts in The New Scientist, versions were printed in The Saturday Review and Popular Science. Newspapers announced the winning of the first challenge. The lecture was included as the final chapter in the 1961 book, Miniaturization.
Impact
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