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Richard Feynman dreamed up the idea of nanotechnology in 1959, but the be aware wouldn’t be coined until 1974. Historians debate how grand his imaginative and prescient drove innovations in the field.
(Image credit: Science Photograph Library)
Milestone: Vision of nanotechnology laid out
Date: Dec. 29, 1959
Where: Pasadena, California
Who: Richard Feynman
On a December day, Richard Feynman gave a fun little lecture at Caltech — and dreamed up an entirely new field of physics.
How small? Feynman went on to nick value advances of the time, such as writing the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, as trivial.
“But that’s nothing; that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below,” Feynman said in his lecture. Rather, he advised, folks may write all the 24-volume encyclopedia on the head of a pin, and elegantly showed that there’s adequate space there to write it legibly and read it out.
He then explored the chance of a quantity of then-futuristic ideas: electron microscopes capable of manipulating individual atoms, ultracompact data storage, miniaturized computers, and considerable, ingestible biological machines that travel into organs admire the heart, acquire defects, and repair them with tiny knives. He proposed a quantity of ways to create these small-scale innovations, collectively with manipulating light and ions.
He ended the lecture by offering a reward of $1,000 to anyone who may miniaturize the text in a book 25,000-fold, such that it may be read utilizing an electron microscope. He offered another $1,000 to anyone who may make a motor no bigger than 1/sixty fourth of an coast cubed.
Richard Feynman dreamed up the idea of nanotechnology in 1959, but the be aware wouldn’t be coined until 1974. Historians debate how grand his imaginative and prescient drove innovations in the field. (Image credit: Photograph 12 / Contributor/ Getty Images)
The latter of these prizes was scooped up the next year by engineer William McLellan, who created a 250-microgram motor peaceful of 13 parts. In his award letter, Feynman congratulated McLellan on the feat but joked that he ought to not “start writing small,” lest he resolve the primary challenge, too and anticipate to obtain the various $1,000 prize.
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“I don’t intend to make good on the other one. Since writing the article I’ve gotten married and bought a house!” Feynman wrote.The frail challenge was eventually solved in 1985, when Stanford graduate Thomas Newman miniaturized the primary page of the Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities.” Feynman did, ultimately, pay up for the 2d prize.
Feynman’s Caltech talk is now mythologized as having ushered in the field of nanotechnology. And but, the term “nanotechnology” itself was no longer coined until 15 years after his talk, when scientist Norio Taniguchi penned a paper about manipulating material at the atomic scale.
In that 1974 paper, Taniguchi described nanotechnology as “the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule.” Many science historians now argue that the field was following its hold trajectory, and that Feynman’s talk, while prescient, wasn’t the actual driver of future innovations. Sooner than 1980, his talk was cited much less than 10 times.
Whether or no longer it drove innovation or no longer, since Feynman’s famous lecture, many of his predictions have proven honest. The scanning tunneling microscope manipulated individual xenon atoms in 1990. Laptop systems more considerable than he described now sit in our pockets, rather than taking up entire rooms. And certainly, tiny nanobots have been designed that can repair damaged blood vessels.
Tia is the editor-in-chief (top rate) and was previously managing editor and senior author for Live Science. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired.com, Science News and various retail outlets. She holds a master’s stage in bioengineering from the College of Washington, a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz and a bachelor’s stage in mechanical engineering from the College of Texas at Austin. Tia was part of a team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that published the Empty Cradles series on preterm births, which won more than one awards, collectively with the 2012 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
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