Room at the Bottom is Growing...
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Room at the Bottom is Growing... In February 1960, Richard Feynman published his now-legendary article entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in Engineering and Science magazine issuing, as he put it, an invitation to enter a new field—that of nanometer-scale science and technology. In addition to making a number of remarkably prescient observations, Feynman also set forth two challenges, replete with prizes: to construct a working electric motor with linear dimensions of 1/64 of an inch and to shrink a page of readable text by 1/25,000. An illustration of the practical difficulties in scaling dimensions of physical objects by orders of magnitude is that the first challenge was met by 1962, but it was not until 1987 that a group at Stanford University accomplished the second, using electron beam lithography. At least in hindsight, the pressures for miniaturization have been relentless. The “top down” approach exemplified by integrated circuit technology has enabled reductions by many orders of magnitude in size, and now the power of “bottom up” approaches that exploit knowledge of chemically and biologically directed assembly techniques is becoming apparent. Where “top down” meets “bottom up,” we can anticipate a flourish of scientific development and engineering possibilities. These general trends have also been greatly abetted by science breakthroughs, such as the demonstration of vacuum tunneling that has led to the scanning tunneling microscope, and density functional theory computations that have produced tremendous theoretical insights about atomic-scale structure. But even before any of the wonderful tools of nanoscale science and technology existed, Feynman understood the vast potential of the nanoscale, “It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.” Where did Feynman’s enthusiasm take us? On January 21, 2000, standing in front of an image of the Western hemisphere written in gold atoms, President Bill Clinton announced the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a U.S. federal budget proposal for the 2001 fiscal year slated to invest hundreds of millions of new dollars in research programs in nanoscience and engineering (see the MRS website < www. mrs.org/pa/nanotech > for details and
MRS BULLETIN/APRIL 2000
If it comes anywhere close to full fruition, the [National Nanotechnology Initiative] is likely to have an intellectual, financial, and cultural impact on almost every MRS member, including those outside the United States. links). In his State of the Union address to Congress delivered a week after the nanotechnology announcement, the President remarked, in reference to nanoscale technology, “Soon researchers will bring us ... materials 10 times stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight; and—this is unbelievable to me—molecular computers the size of a tear drop with the power of today’s fastest supercomputers.” I found it no
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