NT – TO PLAY WITH NATURE

One of the first to advocate a future for NANOTECHNOLOGY (NT) was Sir Richard Feynman, a physics Nobel laureate who died in 1988. In late 1959 at the California institute of Technology, he presented what has become one of the 20^th century science’s classic lectures entitled “There is plenty of room at the bottom”. Feynman got his motivation from biology since biological systems are exceedingly small scale with high storage capacity. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want.

Feynman talked about nanotechnology before the word existed. Feynman dreamed with a technological vision of extreme miniaturization in 1959, several years before the word ‘chip” became a part of our every day life. Extrapolating from known physical laws, Feynman argued it was possible to write all 25,000 pages of the 1959 edition of the encyclopedia Britannic in an area the size of a pin head. He calculated that a million such pinheads would amount to an area of about a 35 pages pamphlet. Feynman further added “All of the information which all of man kind has ever recorded in books can be carried in a pamphlet in your hand and not written in code, but a simple reproduction of the original pictures, engravings and every thing else on a small scale without loss of resolution”.

And that’s just how his talk began. He out outlined how, with proper coding, all the world’s books at the time actually could be stored in something the size of a dust speck, with each of the billions of bits in those books requiring a mere 100 atoms to store. How about building computer using wires, transistors and other components discussed about using big tools to make smaller tools suitable for yet making smaller tools and so on, until researches had tools sized just right for directly manipulating atoms in the molecules Feynman further predicted that we will be able to literally place atoms one by one in exactly the arrangement that we want. “Up to now” he added again “we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on large scales with them and we hope to get a pure substance with just so much impurity and so on. But we must always accept some atomic arrangements that nature gives us… I can hardly doubt that when we have some control of the arrangement of things on a small scale we enormously come across greater range of possible properties that substances have and of different things that we can do.

Repeatedly, during this famous lecture Feynman reminded his audience that he was not joking. “I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible some day only if the laws are not what we talk and what we think.” I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think, we are not doing it simply because we have not yet gotten around to it.

“Nano Technology is the way of ingeniously controlling the building of small and large structures, with intricate properties; it is the way of the future, a way of precise, controlled building, with incidentally, environmental benignness built in by design” This technology brought us to a situation where we ask "'To boldly go where no man has gone before' ... but should we go beyond the natural limits of our humanness?"