Subject: Feynman's 1959 talk on the web

From: Ralph Merkle <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 08:09:01 PDT

"E. Lewars" <[email-masked]> said:

>  Someone recently asked about nanotechnology --how seriously should we take it?
>  For a paper and some refs see Angewande Chemie, Int. Ed. English,
>  1997, 36(6), 585-587.  The idea of nanotechnology seems to begin, in its
>  popular modern incarnation anyway, with the Nobel-prizewinning physicist
>  Richard Feynman (of quantum electrodynamics and Feynman diagrams) in a
>  lecture around 1960 and his 1961 book (ref 1 in the paper).

Feynman's 1959 talk, published in the February 1960 issue of Caltech's
Engineering and Science, is available on the web at
http://nano.xerox.com/nanotech/feynman.html

In his talk, Feynman said:

  But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether,
  ultimately---in the great future---we can arrange the atoms the way
  we want; the very <i>atoms</i>, all the way down!  What would happen if
  we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them
  (within reason, of course; you can't put them so that they are
  chemically unstable, for example).

  Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find
  minerals.  We heat them and we do things on a large scale with them,
  and we hope to get a pure substance with just so much impurity, and
  so on.  But we must always accept some atomic arrangement that
  nature gives us.  We haven't got anything, say, with a
  "checkerboard" arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly
  arranged 1,000 angstroms apart, or in some other particular pattern.

  What could we do with layered structures with just the right
  layers?  What would the properties of materials be if we could really
  arrange the atoms the way we want them?  They would be very
  interesting to investigate theoretically.  I can't see exactly what
  would happen, but I can hardly doubt that when we have some
  <i>control</i> of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get
  an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can
  have, and of different things that we can do.