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There's plenty of room at the bottom.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
Nanotechnology's founding slogan: the room is the gap between the size of our tools and the size of atoms, and almost nobody was using it. Researchers cite the title as the moment the field was imagined, though the talk itself was little noticed for decades. It remains a favourite opening line for grant proposals and nano-science talks.
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This is the title of a talk Feynman gave on 29 December 1959 at the American Physical Society's annual meeting, held at Caltech, subtitled 'An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics'. He considered what could be done by manipulating individual atoms as a kind of synthetic chemistry. He closed with two challenges, offering $1,000 for each: a working motor within a cube 1/64 inch on a side, and a second involving text at tiny scale. Caltech graduate William McLellan met the first by November 1960. The talk went largely unnoticed until the 1980s.
Sources (1)
- Wikipedia: There's Plenty of Room at the Bottomlead and 'Challenges' sectionsReference checked
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