" There's Lots of Spaces under it" is a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considers the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a form of synthetic chemistry that is stronger than that used in at that time. The conversation escaped attention and did not inspire the conceptual beginning of the field. In the 1990s it was rediscovered and published as a seminal event in the field, perhaps to enhance the history of nanotechnology with Feynman's reputation.
Video There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Conception
Feynman considers some interesting consequences of the general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. He is very interested in the possibility of more dense computer circuits, and microscopes that can see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscopes. These ideas were later realized by the use of scanning tunneling microscopes, atomic force microscopes and other examples of scanning probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede, made by researchers at IBM.
Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to create a nanoscale machine that "arranges the atoms as we wish", and performs chemical synthesis with mechanical manipulation.
He also presented the possibility of "swallowing a doctor", an idea he credited in an essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs. This concept involves the construction of a small surgical robot that can be swallowed.
As a mind experiment, he proposed developing a set of hand-scaled manipulator sets that were knit into the operator's hands to build a quarter of the analog scale machine tools found in every machine shop. These small devices will then be used by small hands to build and operate ten hand devices and one-sixteen scale equipment, and so on, culminating in perhaps a billion small factories to achieve massive parallel operations. He uses the pantograph analogy as a way of lowering the scale of items. This idea was anticipated in part, up to the micro scale, by science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1942 story Waldo. As the size diminishes, one has to redesign some tools, since the relative strength of the various forces will change. Although gravity will become unimportant, the surface tension will become more important, the appeal of Van der Waals will be important, etc. Feynman mentioned this scale issue during the conversation. No one has tried to implement this thought experiment, although it has been noted that some types of biological enzymes and enzyme complexes (especially ribosomes) function chemically in a way close to Feynman's vision. Feynman also mentioned in his lecture that it might be better to eventually use glass or plastic because its greater uniformity would avoid problems on a very small scale (metal and crystals separated into domains where lattice structures apply). This could be a good reason to make machines and electronics out of glass and plastic. At this time, there are electronic components made of both materials. In glass, there are fiber-optic cables that amplify the light pulses at regular intervals, using glass doped with rare element erbium. Flown glass is connected to the fiber and pumped by lasers operating at different frequencies. In plastic, field effect transistors are being made with polythiophene, a plastic invented by Alan J. Heeger et al. which becomes electrical conductors when oxidized. At the moment, a factor of only 20 in electron mobility separates the plastic from silicon.
Maps There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Challenges
At the meeting, Feynman ended his lecture with two challenges, and he offered a $ 1000 reward for the first individual who completed each. The first challenge involved the construction of a small motor, which, to Feynman's surprise, was achieved in November 1960 by William McLellan, a meticulous craftsman, using conventional tools. Motor meets requirements, but does not advance art. The second challenge involves the possibility of lowering the letters small enough to fit all of the EncyclopÃÆ'Â|dia Britannica on the pin head, by writing information from the book's page on the surface. 1/25,000 smaller on a linear scale. In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, succeeded in reducing the first paragraph A Tale of Two Cities by 1/25,000, and collecting a second Feynman prize.
Impact
K. Eric Drexler then took the Feynman concept from a billion small factories and added the idea that they could make more copies of themselves, through computer control rather than control by human operators, in his 1986 Machine of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology .
After Feynman's death, scholars who studied the historical development of nanotechnology have concluded that his actual role in catalyzing nanotechnology research is limited based on the memories of many newly born people in the 1980s and 1990s. Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, has reconstructed the history of the publication and publication of Feynman's lectures, along with a citation note for "Plenty of Space" in scientific literature. In his 2008 Toumey article, "Reading Feynman into Nanotechnology", he found 11 publications of "Lots of Space", plus two examples of Feynman's "Infinitesimal Machinery," which Feynman calls "Lots of Space, Revisited." Toumey's reference is a videotape of the second talk.
Toumey found that the published version of the Feynman talks had a negligible influence in the twenty years after it was first published, as measured by citations in the scientific literature, and had little influence in the decade after the Scanning Tunneling Microscope was invented in 1981. Furthermore, "Lots of Space" in the scientific literature greatly improved in the early 1990s. This may be because the term "nanotechnology" received serious attention before that time, after its use by Drexler in his 1986 book, The Machine of Creation: The upcoming era of Nanotechnology, quoted Feynman, and in a cover article entitled "Nanotechnology" , published later that year in a mass-oriented magazine, OMNI . The journal Nanotechnology was launched in 1989; the famous Eigler-Schweizer experiment, precisely manipulating 35 xenon atoms, was published in Nature in April 1990; and Science had special problems in nanotechnology in November 1991. These and other developments suggest that retroactive Feynman's "Plenty of Room" retroactives provide packaged history nanotechnology that gave early December 1959 date, plus a connection to charisma and genius Richard Feynman.
Toumey's analysis also includes comments from eminent scientists in the field of nanotechnology who say that "Lots of Spaces" does not affect their original work, and in fact most of them have not read it until later.
Feynman's stature as a Nobel laureate and an iconic figure in 20th century science really helps nanotechnology supporters and provides valuable intellectual links to the past. More concretely, its stature and the exact atomic fabrication concept play a role in securing funding for nanotechnology research, illustrated by President Clinton's January 2000 speech calling for the Federal program:
My budget supports the new National Nanotechnology Initiative, worth $ 500 million. Caltech is no stranger to the notion of nanotechnology's ability to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular levels. More than 40 years ago, Caltech himself Richard Feynman asked, "What will happen if we can arrange atoms one by one as we want?"
While the version of the Research and Development of the Nanotechnology Act passed by the House of Representatives in May 2003 called for a technical feasibility study of molecular manufacturing, the study was removed to keep research funding less controversial before the law was passed by the Senate and eventually signed into law by President Bush on December 3 2003.
Fictional by-products
- In "The Tree of Time", a short story published in 1964, Damon Knight used the idea of ​​a barrier that must be built atom by atom (time barrier, in story).
Edition
See also
- Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize
References
External links
- Feynman's 1959 classic chat: There's Lots of Room Under
- There's Lots of Room Under in February 1960 Engineering and Science Caltech Magazine
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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