I enjoyed reading Toni Feder’s news item, “Incentive Prizes Reinvented to Solve Problems” (PHYSICS TODAY, November 2010, page 21). I was a little surprised, though, that a physics publication would omit mention of the challenges Richard Feynman put forward to the American Physical Society in a talk he presented in December 1959 titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” In that talk, he made the following challenge:
It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope.
And I want to offer another prize—if I can figure out how to phrase it so that I don’t get into a mess of arguments about definitions—of another $1,000 to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor—a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64 inch cube.
I do not expect that such prizes will have to wait very long for claimants.1
The second prize was indeed claimed within the year, by William McLellan. But the first had to wait until 1985 when my student Tom Newman wrote the first page of A Tale of Two Cities in an area 6 microns square using an electron-beam column interfaced to a Mac-2 computer to write the letters in 25-nm-wide lines.2 As Feder points out, the prize money rarely pays for the research (in Tom’s case, the US Army Research Laboratory did), but it nonetheless provides incentive. Tom at first wanted to frame the check from Feynman but then settled for framing a copy and spending the cash.
