Microscience: an overview

Just about twenty years ago, at the Christmas, 1959, meeting of The American Physical Society at Cal Tech, Richard P. Feynman gave a delightful talk, “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” He said at first that he imagined that experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who opened the field of low temperatures, which seems to be bottomless—one can go down and down, or Percy Bridgman who, in designing a way to obtain high pressure, opened up another new field—in which one can go up and up. Attainment of ever higher vacuum, he said, was a continuing development of the same kind. He then went on to say that he wanted “to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle.” This was the field of miniaturization, the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.