Many workers in nanotechnology cite Richard Feynman’s after-dinner speech, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom,” which was given by him on December 29, 1959, to be the birthday of theoretical nanotechnology. This attribution is misleading because there is no direct link from Feynman’s talk to today’s micromachines. We discuss the historical background of Feynman’s talk, the state of the art in 1959, and Feynman’s motivation. We conclude that Feynman was not interested in building miniaturized versions of existing macroscopic machines, but wished to construct microbiological machines and tools that would enable scientists to mimic microbiological materials.
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© 2006 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2006
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