There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom
So you’re triggered by our call for products and now you’re considering to send in one, two or maybe three of your brilliant products for the Nano Supermarket? Good. Or – and this is very likely – you are just interested in this emerging new field of science and design? Also good. In both cases, we recommend you to do a little in-depth nanotech reading. And makes a better starting point to read than, well… the beginning?
December 29th 1959, physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture titled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech. In this lecture, he layed out the new era of what we nowadays call nanotechnology: the study of the controlling (and designing!) of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. The key question in Feynman’s talk was: What would happen if we could arrange the atoms – one by one, any way we want them?
Well, this question is still largely left unanswered: we might be designing the penicillin or the asbestos of the 21st century. This makes the question how to design our nanotech future an urgent one, hence our call for entries. Either way, being able to design atom-by-atom would bring us into a new era of design that merges all existing design disciplines into one: Total Design?
