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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzRevq8d3hmxEYaijnwPuN1ug-mxosN1AlNVZaw2XV7i39wSz_wojckRlgWJ9Q4uN-XPIWrmm-kh138Bk2vBXFUu5saxMXZnpy8gZvtNDZ8roj8tf6PcI01RqpajdZMgPWcWElvXYGDU/s1600/Richard+Fynman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzRevq8d3hmxEYaijnwPuN1ug-mxosN1AlNVZaw2XV7i39wSz_wojckRlgWJ9Q4uN-XPIWrmm-kh138Bk2vBXFUu5saxMXZnpy8gZvtNDZ8roj8tf6PcI01RqpajdZMgPWcWElvXYGDU/s1600/Richard+Fynman.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">This is the transcript of the classic talk that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech and was first published in the February 1960 issue of Caltech's <u>Engineering and Science</u>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica; font-size: large;"><b>Nanotechnology</b></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman, in designing a way to obtain higher pressures, opened up another new field and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind. <br /> I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense of, "What are the strange particles?'') but it is more like solid-state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most important is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications. <br /> What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale. <br /> As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. 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. <br /><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: white;"><b><i>Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin?</i></b></span></span> <br /> Let's see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch -- that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter -- 32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. <br /> Furthermore, it can be read if it is so written. Let's imagine that it is written in raised letters of metal; that is, where the black is in the Encyclopedia, we have raised letters of metal that are actually 1/25,000 of their ordinary size. How would we read it? <br /> If we had something written in such a way, we could read it using techniques in common use today. (They will undoubtedly find a better way when we do actually have it written, but to make my point conservatively I shall just take techniques we know today....<span style="font-size: xx-small;">that was in 1959!!!!</span>) We would press the metal into a plastic material and make a mold of it, then peel the plastic off very carefully, evaporate silica into the plastic to get a very thin film, then shadow it by evaporating gold at an angle against the silica so that all the little letters will appear clearly, dissolve the plastic away from the silica film, and then look through it with an electron microscope! <br /> There is no question that if the thing were reduced by 25,000 times in the form of raised letters on the pin, it would be easy for us to read it today. Furthermore; there is no question that we would find it easy to make copies of the master; we would just need to press the same metal plate again into plastic and we would have another copy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>How do we write small?</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> The next question is: How do we <i>write</i> it? We have no standard technique to do this now. But let me argue that it is not as difficult as it first appears to be. We can reverse the lenses of the electron microscope in order to demagnify as well as magnify. A source of ions, sent through the microscope lenses in reverse, could be focused to a very small spot. We could write with that spot like we write in a TV cathode ray oscilloscope, by going across in lines, and having an adjustment which determines the amount of material which is going to be deposited as we scan in lines. <br /> This method might be very slow because of space charge limitations. There will be more rapid methods. We could first make, perhaps by some photo process, a screen which has holes in it in the form of the letters. Then we would strike an arc behind the holes and draw metallic ions through the holes; then we could again use our system of lenses and make a small image in the form of ions, which would deposit the metal on the pin. <br /> A simpler way might be this (though I am not sure it would work): We take light and, through an optical microscope running backwards, we focus it onto a very small photoelectric screen. Then electrons come away from the screen where the light is shining. These electrons are focused down in size by the electron microscope lenses to impinge directly upon the surface of the metal. Will such a beam etch away the metal if it is run long enough? I don't know. If it doesn't work for a metal surface, it must be possible to find some surface with which to coat the original pin so that, where the electrons bombard, a change is made which we could recognize later. <br /> There is no intensity problem in these devices -- not what you are used to in magnification, where you have to take a few electrons and spread them over a bigger and bigger screen; it is just the opposite. The light which we get from a page is concentrated onto a very small area so it is very intense. The few electrons which come from the photoelectric screen are demagnified down to a very tiny area so that, again, they are very intense. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet! <br /> That's the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin, but let's consider all the books in the world. The Library of Congress has approximately 9 million volumes; the British Museum Library has 5 million volumes; there are also 5 million volumes in the National Library in France. Undoubtedly there are duplications, so let us say that there are some 24 million volumes of interest in the world. <br /> What would happen if I print all this down at the scale we have been discussing? How much space would it take? It would take, of course, the area of about a million pinheads because, instead of there being just the 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia, there are 24 million volumes. The million pinheads can be put in a square of a thousand pins on a side, or an area of about 3 square yards. That is to say, the silica replica with the paper-thin backing of plastic, with which we have made the copies, with all this information, is on an area of approximately the size of 35 pages of the Encyclopaedia. That is about half as many pages as there are in this magazine. All of the information which all of mankind has every recorded in books can be carried around in a pamphlet in your hand -- and not written in code, but a simple reproduction of the original pictures, engravings, and everything else on a small scale without loss of resolution. <br /> What would our librarian at Caltech say, as she runs all over from one building to another, if I tell her that, ten years from now, all of the information that she is struggling to keep track of -- 120,000 volumes, stacked from the floor to the ceiling, drawers full of cards, storage rooms full of the older books -- can be kept on just one library card! When the University of Brazil, for example, finds that their library is burned, we can send them a copy of every book in our library by striking off a copy from the master plate in a few hours and mailing it in an envelope no bigger or heavier than any other ordinary air mail letter. <br /> Now, the name of this talk is "There is <i>Plenty</i> of Room at the Bottom'' -- not just "There is Room at the Bottom.'' What I have demonstrated is that there <i>is</i> room -- that you can decrease the size of things in a practical way. I now want to show that there is <i>plenty</i> of room. I will not now discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle -- in other words, what is possible according to the laws of physics. I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws <i>are</i> what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven't yet gotten around to it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Information on a small scale</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> Suppose that, instead of trying to reproduce the pictures and all the information directly in its present form, we write only the information content in a code of dots and dashes, or something like that, to represent the various letters. Each letter represents six or seven "bits'' of information; that is, you need only about six or seven dots or dashes for each letter. Now, instead of writing everything, as I did before, on the <i>surface</i> of the head of a pin, I am going to use the interior of the material as well. <br /> Let us represent a dot by a small spot of one metal, the next dash, by an adjacent spot of another metal, and so on. Suppose, to be conservative, that a bit of information is going to require a little cube of atoms 5 times 5 times 5 -- that is 125 atoms. Perhaps we need a hundred and some odd atoms to make sure that the information is not lost through diffusion, or through some other process. <br /> I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide -- which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is <i>plenty</i> of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm! <br /> This fact -- that enormous amounts of information can be carried in an exceedingly small space -- is, of course, well known to the biologists, and resolves the mystery which existed before we understood all this clearly, of how it could be that, in the tiniest cell, all of the information for the organization of a complex creature such as ourselves can be stored. All this information -- whether we have brown eyes, or whether we think at all, or that in the embryo the jawbone should first develop with a little hole in the side so that later a nerve can grow through it -- all this information is contained in a very tiny fraction of the cell in the form of long-chain DNA molecules in which approximately 50 atoms are used for one bit of information about the cell. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Better electron microscopes</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> If I have written in a code, with 5 times 5 times 5 atoms to a bit, the question is: How could I read it today? The electron microscope is not quite good enough, with the greatest care and effort, it can only resolve about 10 angstroms. I would like to try and impress upon you while I am talking about all of these things on a small scale, the importance of improving the electron microscope by a hundred times. It is not impossible; it is not against the laws of diffraction of the electron. The wave length of the electron in such a microscope is only 1/20 of an angstrom. So it should be possible to see the individual atoms. What good would it be to see individual atoms distinctly? <br /> We have friends in other fields -- in biology, for instance. We physicists often look at them and say, "You know the reason you fellows are making so little progress?'' (Actually I don't know any field where they are making more rapid progress than they are in biology today.) "You should use more mathematics, like we do.'' They could answer us -- but they're polite, so I'll answer for them: "What <i>you</i> should do in order for <i>us</i> to make more rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better.'' <br /> What are the most central and fundamental problems of biology today? They are questions like: What is the sequence of bases in the DNA? What happens when you have a mutation? How is the base order in the DNA connected to the order of amino acids in the protein? What is the structure of the RNA; is it single-chain or double-chain, and how is it related in its order of bases to the DNA? What is the organization of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsome">microsomes</a>? How are proteins synthesized? Where does the RNA go? How does it sit? Where do the proteins sit? Where do the amino acids go in? In photosynthesis, where is the chlorophyll; how is it arranged; where are the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenoid">carotenoids</a> involved in this thing? What is the system of the conversion of light into chemical energy? <br /> It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just <i>look at the thing!</i> You will see the order of bases in the chain; you will see the structure of the microsome. Unfortunately, the present microscope sees at a scale which is just a bit too crude. Make the microscope one hundred times more powerful, and many problems of biology would be made very much easier. I exaggerate, of course, but the biologists would surely be very thankful to you -- and they would prefer that to the criticism that they should use more mathematics. <br /> The theory of chemical processes today is based on theoretical physics. In this sense, physics supplies the foundation of chemistry. But chemistry also has analysis. If you have a strange substance and you want to know what it is, you go through a long and complicated process of chemical analysis. You can analyze almost anything today, so I am a little late with my idea. But if the physicists wanted to, they could also dig under the chemists in the problem of chemical analysis. It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; all one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor. (Later, I would like to ask the question: Can the physicists do something about the third problem of chemistry -- namely, synthesis? Is there a <i>physical</i> way to synthesize any chemical substance? <br /> The reason the electron microscope is so poor is that the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmNIouLByJQ">f- value</a> of the lenses is only 1 part to 1,000; you don't have a big enough numerical aperture. And I know that there are theorems which prove that it is impossible, with axially symmetrical stationary field lenses, to produce an f-value any bigger than so and so; and therefore the resolving power at the present time is at its theoretical maximum. But in every theorem there are assumptions. Why must the field be symmetrical? I put this out as a challenge: Is there no way to make the electron microscope more powerful? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>The marvelous biological system</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> The biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired me to think of something that should be possible. Biology is not simply writing information; it is <i>doing something</i> about it. A biological system can be exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all kinds of marvelous things -- all on a very small scale. Also, they store information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want -- that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level! <br /> There may even be an economic point to this business of making things very small. Let me remind you of some of the problems of computing machines. In computers we have to store an enormous amount of information. The kind of writing that I was mentioning before, in which I had everything down as a distribution of metal, is permanent. Much more interesting to a computer is a way of writing, erasing, and writing something else. (This is usually because we don't want to waste the material on which we have just written. Yet if we could write it in a very small space, it wouldn't make any difference; it could just be thrown away after it was read. It doesn't cost very much for the material). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Miniaturizing the computer</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> I don't know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can't we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements -- and by little, I mean <i>little</i>. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting -- if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features. <br /> If I look at your face I immediately recognize that I have seen it before. (Actually, my friends will say I have chosen an unfortunate example here for the subject of this illustration. At least I recognize that it is a <i>man</i> and not an <i>apple</i>.) Yet there is no machine which, with that speed, can take a picture of a face and say even that it is a man; and much less that it is the same man that you showed it before -- unless it is exactly the same picture. If the face is changed; if I am closer to the face; if I am further from the face; if the light changes -- I recognize it anyway. Now, this little computer I carry in my head is easily able to do that. The computers that we build are not able to do that. The number of elements in this bone box of mine are enormously greater than the number of elements in our "wonderful'' computers. But our mechanical computers are too big; the elements in this box are microscopic. I want to make some that are <i>sub</i>microscopic. <br /> If we wanted to make a computer that had all these marvelous extra qualitative abilities, we would have to make it, perhaps, the size of the Pentagon. This has several disadvantages. First, it requires too much material; there may not be enough germanium in the world for all the transistors which would have to be put into this enormous thing. There is also the problem of heat generation and power consumption; TVA would be needed to run the computer. But an even more practical difficulty is that the computer would be limited to a certain speed. Because of its large size, there is finite time required to get the information from one place to another. The information cannot go any faster than the speed of light -- so, ultimately, when our computers get faster and faster and more and more elaborate, we will have to make them smaller and smaller. <br /> But there is plenty of room to make them smaller. There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Miniaturization by evaporation</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> How can we make such a device? What kind of manufacturing processes would we use? One possibility we might consider, since we have talked about writing by putting atoms down in a certain arrangement, would be to evaporate the material, then evaporate the insulator next to it. Then, for the next layer, evaporate another position of a wire, another insulator, and so on. So, you simply evaporate until you have a block of stuff which has the elements -- coils and condensers, transistors and so on -- of exceedingly fine dimensions. <br /> But I would like to discuss, just for amusement, that there are other possibilities. Why can't we manufacture these small computers somewhat like we manufacture the big ones? Why can't we drill holes, cut things, solder things, stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like your wife's wrist watch, have you said to yourself, "If I could only train an ant to do this!'' What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make. <br /> Consider any machine -- for example, an automobile -- and ask about the problems of making an infinitesimal machine like it. Suppose, in the particular design of the automobile, we need a certain precision of the parts; we need an accuracy, let's suppose, of 4/10,000 of an inch. If things are more inaccurate than that in the shape of the cylinder and so on, it isn't going to work very well. If I make the thing too small, I have to worry about the size of the atoms; I can't make a circle of "balls'' so to speak, if the circle is too small. So, if I make the error, corresponding to 4/10,000 of an inch, correspond to an error of 10 atoms, it turns out that I can reduce the dimensions of an automobile 4,000 times, approximately -- so that it is 1 mm. across. Obviously, if you redesign the car so that it would work with a much larger tolerance, which is not at all impossible, then you could make a much smaller device. <br /> It is interesting to consider what the problems are in such small machines. Firstly, with parts stressed to the same degree, the forces go as the area you are reducing, so that things like weight and inertia are of relatively no importance. The strength of material, in other words, is very much greater in proportion. The stresses and expansion of the flywheel from centrifugal force, for example, would be the same proportion only if the rotational speed is increased in the same proportion as we decrease the size. On the other hand, the metals that we use have a grain structure, and this would be very annoying at small scale because the material is not homogeneous. Plastics and glass and things of this amorphous nature are very much more homogeneous, and so we would have to make our machines out of such materials. <br /> There are problems associated with the electrical part of the system -- with the copper wires and the magnetic parts. The magnetic properties on a very small scale are not the same as on a large scale; there is the "domain'' problem involved. A big magnet made of millions of domains can only be made on a small scale with one domain. The electrical equipment won't simply be scaled down; it has to be redesigned. But I can see no reason why it can't be redesigned to work again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Problems of lubrication</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> Lubrication involves some interesting points. The effective viscosity of oil would be higher and higher in proportion as we went down (and if we increase the speed as much as we can). If we don't increase the speed so much, and change from oil to kerosene or some other fluid, the problem is not so bad. But actually we may not have to lubricate at all! We have a lot of extra force. Let the bearings run dry; they won't run hot because the heat escapes away from such a small device very, very rapidly. <br /> This rapid heat loss would prevent the gasoline from exploding, so an internal combustion engine is impossible. Other chemical reactions, liberating energy when cold, can be used. Probably an external supply of electrical power would be most convenient for such small machines. <br /> What would be the utility of such machines? Who knows? Of course, a small automobile would only be useful for the mites to drive around in, and I suppose our Christian interests don't go that far. However, we did note the possibility of the manufacture of small elements for computers in completely automatic factories, containing lathes and other machine tools at the very small level. The small lathe would not have to be exactly like our big lathe. I leave to your imagination the improvement of the design to take full advantage of the properties of things on a small scale, and in such a way that the fully automatic aspect would be easiest to manage. <br /> A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs) suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and "looks'' around. (Of course the information has to be fed out.) It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately-functioning organ. <br /> Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can't handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the "hands'' there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely. <br /> Most of these devices are actually made rather simply, in that there is a particular cable, like a marionette string, that goes directly from the controls to the "hands.'' But, of course, things also have been made using servo motors, so that the connection between the one thing and the other is electrical rather than mechanical. When you turn the levers, they turn a servo motor, and it changes the electrical currents in the wires, which repositions a motor at the other end. <br /> Now, I want to build much the same device -- a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the "hands'' that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway -- the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands. <br /> Well, you get the principle from there on. It is rather a difficult program, but it is a possibility. You might say that one can go much farther in one step than from one to four. Of course, this has all to be designed very carefully and it is not necessary simply to make it like hands. If you thought of it very carefully, you could probably arrive at a much better system for doing such things. <br /> If you work through a pantograph, even today, you can get much more than a factor of four in even one step. But you can't work directly through a pantograph which makes a smaller pantograph which then makes a smaller pantograph -- because of the looseness of the holes and the irregularities of construction. The end of the pantograph wiggles with a relatively greater irregularity than the irregularity with which you move your hands. In going down this scale, I would find the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph shaking so badly that it wasn't doing anything sensible at all. <br /> At each stage, it is necessary to improve the precision of the apparatus. If, for instance, having made a small lathe with a pantograph, we find its lead screw irregular -- more irregular than the large-scale one -- we could lap the lead screw against breakable nuts that you can reverse in the usual way back and forth until this lead screw is, at its scale, as accurate as our original lead screws, at our scale. <br /> We can make flats by rubbing unflat surfaces in triplicates together -- in three pairs -- and the flats then become flatter than the thing you started with. Thus, it is not impossible to improve precision on a small scale by the correct operations. So, when we build this stuff, it is necessary at each step to improve the accuracy of the equipment by working for awhile down there, making accurate lead screws, Johansen blocks, and all the other materials which we use in accurate machine work at the higher level. We have to stop at each level and manufacture all the stuff to go to the next level -- a very long and very difficult program. Perhaps you can figure a better way than that to get down to small scale more rapidly. <br /> Yet, after all this, you have just got one little baby lathe four thousand times smaller than usual. But we were thinking of making an enormous computer, which we were going to build by drilling holes on this lathe to make little washers for the computer. How many washers can you manufacture on this one lathe? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>A hundred tiny hands</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> When I make my first set of slave "hands'' at one-fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of "hands,'' and I wire them to my original levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred "hands'' at the 1/16th size. <br /> Where am I going to put the million lathes that I am going to have? Why, there is nothing to it; the volume is much less than that of even one full-scale lathe. For instance, if I made a billion little lathes, each 1/4000 of the scale of a regular lathe, there are plenty of materials and space available because in the billion little ones there is less than 2 percent of the materials in one big lathe. <br /> It doesn't cost anything for materials, you see. So I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously, drilling holes, stamping parts, and so on. <br /> As we go down in size, there are a number of interesting problems that arise. All things do not simply scale down in proportion. There is the problem that materials stick together by the molecular (Van der Waals) attractions. It would be like this: After you have made a part and you unscrew the nut from a bolt, it isn't going to fall down because the gravity isn't appreciable; it would even be hard to get it off the bolt. It would be like those old movies of a man with his hands full of molasses, trying to get rid of a glass of water. There will be several problems of this nature that we will have to be ready to design for. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Rearranging the atoms</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately -- in the great future -- we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very <i> atoms</i>, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them (within reason, of course; you can't put them so that they are chemically unstable, for example). <br /> Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on a large scale 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 arrangement that nature gives us. We haven't got anything, say, with a "checkerboard'' arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly arranged 1,000 angstroms apart, or in some other particular pattern. <br /> What could we do with layered structures with just the right layers? What would the properties of materials be if we could really arrange the atoms the way we want them? They would be very interesting to investigate theoretically. I can't see exactly what would happen, but I can hardly doubt that when we have some <i>control</i> of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of different things that we can do. <br /> Consider, for example, a piece of material in which we make little coils and condensers (or their solid state analogs) 1,000 or 10,000 angstroms in a circuit, one right next to the other, over a large area, with little antennas sticking out at the other end -- a whole series of circuits. Is it possible, for example, to emit light from a whole set of antennas, like we emit radio waves from an organized set of antennas to beam the radio programs to Europe? The same thing would be to <i>beam</i> the light out in a definite direction with very high intensity. (Perhaps such a beam is not very useful technically or economically.) <br /> I have thought about some of the problems of building electric circuits on a small scale, and the problem of resistance is serious. If you build a corresponding circuit on a small scale, its natural frequency goes up, since the wave length goes down as the scale; but the skin depth only decreases with the square root of the scale ratio, and so resistive problems are of increasing difficulty. Possibly we can beat resistance through the use of superconductivity if the frequency is not too high, or by other tricks. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>Atoms in a small world</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> When we get to the very, very small world -- say circuits of seven atoms -- we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like <i>nothing</i> on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc. <br /> Another thing we will notice is that, if we go down far enough, all of our devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies of one another. We cannot build two large machines so that the dimensions are exactly the same. But if your machine is only 100 atoms high, you only have to get it correct to one-half of one percent to make sure the other machine is exactly the same size -- namely, 100 atoms high! <br /> At the atomic level, we have new kinds of forces and new kinds of possibilities, new kinds of effects. The problems of manufacture and reproduction of materials will be quite different. I am, as I said, inspired by the biological phenomena in which chemical forces are used in repetitious fashion to produce all kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author). <br /> The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big. <br /> Ultimately, we can do chemical synthesis. A chemist comes to us and says, "Look, I want a molecule that has the atoms arranged thus and so; make me that molecule.'' The chemist does a mysterious thing when he wants to make a molecule. He sees that it has got that ring, so he mixes this and that, and he shakes it, and he fiddles around. And, at the end of a difficult process, he usually does succeed in synthesizing what he wants. By the time I get my devices working, so that we can do it by physics, he will have figured out how to synthesize absolutely anything, so that this will really be useless. <br /> But it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible (I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. Give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed -- a development which I think cannot be avoided. <br /> Now, you might say, "Who should do this and why should they do it?'' Well, I pointed out a few of the economic applications, but I know that the reason that you would do it might be just for fun. But have some fun! Let's have a competition between laboratories. Let one laboratory make a tiny motor which it sends to another lab which sends it back with a thing that fits inside the shaft of the first motor. </span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><i>High school competition</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"> Just for the fun of it, and in order to get kids interested in this field, I would propose that someone who has some contact with the high schools think of making some kind of high school competition. After all, we haven't even started in this field, and even the kids can write smaller than has ever been written before. They could have competition in high schools. The Los Angeles high school could send a pin to the Venice high school on which it says, "How's this?'' They get the pin back, and in the dot of the "i'' it says, "Not so hot.'' <br /> Perhaps this doesn't excite you to do it, and only economics will do so. Then I want to do something; but I can't do it at the present moment, because I haven't prepared the ground. 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. <br /> 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. <br /> I do not expect that such prizes will have to wait very long for claimants. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07353795515318839209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2877242326254892896.post-58498704121270591252015-03-06T12:04:00.000-08:002015-03-07T04:53:36.365-08:00L'engrenage<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07353795515318839209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2877242326254892896.post-87564848944355642352015-02-18T01:34:00.000-08:002015-02-18T06:12:54.155-08:00Richard Feynman<a href="http://schonegger.com/nanotechnology.html">http://schonegger.com/nanotechnology.html</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzRevq8d3hmxEYaijnwPuN1ug-mxosN1AlNVZaw2XV7i39wSz_wojckRlgWJ9Q4uN-XPIWrmm-kh138Bk2vBXFUu5saxMXZnpy8gZvtNDZ8roj8tf6PcI01RqpajdZMgPWcWElvXYGDU/s1600/Richard+Fynman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzRevq8d3hmxEYaijnwPuN1ug-mxosN1AlNVZaw2XV7i39wSz_wojckRlgWJ9Q4uN-XPIWrmm-kh138Bk2vBXFUu5saxMXZnpy8gZvtNDZ8roj8tf6PcI01RqpajdZMgPWcWElvXYGDU/s1600/Richard+Fynman.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">This is the transcript of the classic talk that Richard
Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American
Physical Society at Caltech and was first published in the February 1960 issue
of Caltech's <u>Engineering and Science</u>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica; font-size: large;"><b>Nanotechnology</b></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like
Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be
bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader
and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman, in
designing a way to obtain higher pressures, opened up another new field and was
able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher
vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind. <br />
I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which
an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as
the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense
of, "What are the strange particles?'') but it is more like solid-state physics
in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange
phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most
important is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications.
<br />
What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling
things on a small scale. <br />
As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far
it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of
the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell
me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. But that's
nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to
discuss. 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. <br />
<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: white;"><b><i>Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica
on the head of a pin?</i></b></span></span> <br />
Let's see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch
across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin
is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the
Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye
is about 1/120 of an inch -- that is roughly the diameter of one of the little
dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you
demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter -- 32 atoms
across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would
contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as
required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough
room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. <br />
Furthermore, it can be read if it is so written. Let's imagine that it is
written in raised letters of metal; that is, where the black is in the
Encyclopedia, we have raised letters of metal that are actually 1/25,000 of
their ordinary size. How would we read it? <br />
If we had something written in such a way, we could read it using techniques
in common use today. (They will undoubtedly find a better way when we do
actually have it written, but to make my point conservatively I shall just take
techniques we know today....<span style="font-size: xx-small;">that was in 1959!!!!</span>) We would press the metal into a plastic material and
make a mold of it, then peel the plastic off very carefully, evaporate silica
into the plastic to get a very thin film, then shadow it by evaporating gold at
an angle against the silica so that all the little letters will appear clearly,
dissolve the plastic away from the silica film, and then look through it with an
electron microscope! <br />
There is no question that if the thing were reduced by 25,000 times in the
form of raised letters on the pin, it would be easy for us to read it today.
Furthermore; there is no question that we would find it easy to make copies of
the master; we would just need to press the same metal plate again into plastic
and we would have another copy. <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>How do we write small?</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
The next question is: How do we <i>write</i> it? We have no standard
technique to do this now. But let me argue that it is not as difficult as it
first appears to be. We can reverse the lenses of the electron microscope in
order to demagnify as well as magnify. A source of ions, sent through the
microscope lenses in reverse, could be focused to a very small spot. We could
write with that spot like we write in a TV cathode ray oscilloscope, by going
across in lines, and having an adjustment which determines the amount of
material which is going to be deposited as we scan in lines. <br />
This method might be very slow because of space charge limitations. There
will be more rapid methods. We could first make, perhaps by some photo process,
a screen which has holes in it in the form of the letters. Then we would strike
an arc behind the holes and draw metallic ions through the holes; then we could
again use our system of lenses and make a small image in the form of ions, which
would deposit the metal on the pin. <br />
A simpler way might be this (though I am not sure it would work): We take
light and, through an optical microscope running backwards, we focus it onto a
very small photoelectric screen. Then electrons come away from the screen where
the light is shining. These electrons are focused down in size by the electron
microscope lenses to impinge directly upon the surface of the metal. Will such a
beam etch away the metal if it is run long enough? I don't know. If it doesn't
work for a metal surface, it must be possible to find some surface with which to
coat the original pin so that, where the electrons bombard, a change is made
which we could recognize later. <br />
There is no intensity problem in these devices -- not what you are used to in
magnification, where you have to take a few electrons and spread them over a
bigger and bigger screen; it is just the opposite. The light which we get from a
page is concentrated onto a very small area so it is very intense. The few
electrons which come from the photoelectric screen are demagnified down to a
very tiny area so that, again, they are very intense. I don't know why this
hasn't been done yet! <br />
That's the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin, but let's consider
all the books in the world. The Library of Congress has approximately 9 million
volumes; the British Museum Library has 5 million volumes; there are also 5
million volumes in the National Library in France. Undoubtedly there are
duplications, so let us say that there are some 24 million volumes of interest
in the world. <br />
What would happen if I print all this down at the scale we have been
discussing? How much space would it take? It would take, of course, the area of
about a million pinheads because, instead of there being just the 24 volumes of
the Encyclopaedia, there are 24 million volumes. The million pinheads can be put
in a square of a thousand pins on a side, or an area of about 3 square yards.
That is to say, the silica replica with the paper-thin backing of plastic, with
which we have made the copies, with all this information, is on an area of
approximately the size of 35 pages of the Encyclopaedia. That is about half as
many pages as there are in this magazine. All of the information which all of
mankind has every recorded in books can be carried around in a pamphlet in your
hand -- and not written in code, but a simple reproduction of the original
pictures, engravings, and everything else on a small scale without loss of
resolution. <br />
What would our librarian at Caltech say, as she runs all over from one
building to another, if I tell her that, ten years from now, all of the
information that she is struggling to keep track of -- 120,000 volumes,
stacked from the floor to the ceiling, drawers full of cards, storage rooms full
of the older books -- can be kept on just one library card! When the University
of Brazil, for example, finds that their library is burned, we can send them a
copy of every book in our library by striking off a copy from the master plate
in a few hours and mailing it in an envelope no bigger or heavier than any other
ordinary air mail letter. <br />
Now, the name of this talk is "There is <i>Plenty</i> of Room at the Bottom''
-- not just "There is Room at the Bottom.'' What I have demonstrated is that
there <i>is</i> room -- that you can decrease the size of things in a practical
way. I now want to show that there is <i>plenty</i> of room. I will not now
discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle -- in
other words, what is possible according to the laws of physics. I am not
inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what
we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws <i>are</i> what we
think; we are not doing it simply because we haven't yet gotten around to it.
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Information on a small scale</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
Suppose that, instead of trying to reproduce the pictures and all the
information directly in its present form, we write only the information content
in a code of dots and dashes, or something like that, to represent the various
letters. Each letter represents six or seven "bits'' of information; that is,
you need only about six or seven dots or dashes for each letter. Now, instead of
writing everything, as I did before, on the <i>surface</i> of the head of a pin,
I am going to use the interior of the material as well. <br />
Let us represent a dot by a small spot of one metal, the next dash, by an
adjacent spot of another metal, and so on. Suppose, to be conservative, that a
bit of information is going to require a little cube of atoms 5 times 5 times 5
-- that is 125 atoms. Perhaps we need a hundred and some odd atoms to make sure
that the information is not lost through diffusion, or through some other
process. <br />
I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have
assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume,
and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For
each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that
man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in
this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide -- which
is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is
<i>plenty</i> of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm! <br />
This fact -- that enormous amounts of information can be carried in an
exceedingly small space -- is, of course, well known to the biologists, and
resolves the mystery which existed before we understood all this clearly, of how
it could be that, in the tiniest cell, all of the information for the
organization of a complex creature such as ourselves can be stored. All this
information -- whether we have brown eyes, or whether we think at all, or that
in the embryo the jawbone should first develop with a little hole in the side so
that later a nerve can grow through it -- all this information is contained in a
very tiny fraction of the cell in the form of long-chain DNA molecules in which
approximately 50 atoms are used for one bit of information about the cell. <br />
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Better electron microscopes</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
If I have written in a code, with 5 times 5 times 5 atoms to a bit, the
question is: How could I read it today? The electron microscope is not quite
good enough, with the greatest care and effort, it can only resolve about 10
angstroms. I would like to try and impress upon you while I am talking about all
of these things on a small scale, the importance of improving the electron
microscope by a hundred times. It is not impossible; it is not against the laws
of diffraction of the electron. The wave length of the electron in such a
microscope is only 1/20 of an angstrom. So it should be possible to see the
individual atoms. What good would it be to see individual atoms distinctly? <br />
We have friends in other fields -- in biology, for instance. We physicists
often look at them and say, "You know the reason you fellows are making so
little progress?'' (Actually I don't know any field where they are making more
rapid progress than they are in biology today.) "You should use more
mathematics, like we do.'' They could answer us -- but they're polite, so I'll
answer for them: "What <i>you</i> should do in order for <i>us</i> to make more
rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better.'' <br />
What are the most central and fundamental problems of biology today? They are
questions like: What is the sequence of bases in the DNA? What happens when you
have a mutation? How is the base order in the DNA connected to the order of
amino acids in the protein? What is the structure of the RNA; is it single-chain
or double-chain, and how is it related in its order of bases to the DNA? What is
the organization of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsome">microsomes</a>? How are proteins synthesized? Where does the
RNA go? How does it sit? Where do the proteins sit? Where do the amino acids go
in? In photosynthesis, where is the chlorophyll; how is it arranged; where are
the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenoid">carotenoids</a> involved in this thing? What is the system of the conversion of
light into chemical energy? <br />
It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you
just <i>look at the thing!</i> You will see the order of bases in the chain; you
will see the structure of the microsome. Unfortunately, the present microscope
sees at a scale which is just a bit too crude. Make the microscope one hundred
times more powerful, and many problems of biology would be made very much
easier. I exaggerate, of course, but the biologists would surely be very
thankful to you -- and they would prefer that to the criticism that they should
use more mathematics. <br />
The theory of chemical processes today is based on theoretical physics. In
this sense, physics supplies the foundation of chemistry. But chemistry also has
analysis. If you have a strange substance and you want to know what it is, you
go through a long and complicated process of chemical analysis. You can analyze
almost anything today, so I am a little late with my idea. But if the physicists
wanted to, they could also dig under the chemists in the problem of chemical
analysis. It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical
substance; all one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the
atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times
too poor. (Later, I would like to ask the question: Can the physicists do
something about the third problem of chemistry -- namely, synthesis? Is there a
<i>physical</i> way to synthesize any chemical substance? <br />
The reason the electron microscope is so poor is that the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmNIouLByJQ">f- value</a> of the
lenses is only 1 part to 1,000; you don't have a big enough numerical aperture.
And I know that there are theorems which prove that it is impossible, with
axially symmetrical stationary field lenses, to produce an f-value any bigger
than so and so; and therefore the resolving power at the present time is at its
theoretical maximum. But in every theorem there are assumptions. Why must the
field be symmetrical? I put this out as a challenge: Is there no way to make the
electron microscope more powerful? <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>The marvelous biological system</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
The biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired
me to think of something that should be possible. Biology is not simply writing
information; it is <i>doing something</i> about it. A biological system can be
exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active;
they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do
all kinds of marvelous things -- all on a very small scale. Also, they store
information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small
which does what we want -- that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at
that level! <br />
There may even be an economic point to this business of making things very
small. Let me remind you of some of the problems of computing machines. In
computers we have to store an enormous amount of information. The kind of
writing that I was mentioning before, in which I had everything down as a
distribution of metal, is permanent. Much more interesting to a computer is a
way of writing, erasing, and writing something else. (This is usually because we
don't want to waste the material on which we have just written. Yet if we could
write it in a very small space, it wouldn't make any difference; it could just
be thrown away after it was read. It doesn't cost very much for the material).
<br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Miniaturizing the computer</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
I don't know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do
know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can't we make
them very small, make them of little wires, little elements -- and by little, I
mean <i>little</i>. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in
diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody
who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that
the possibilities of computers are very interesting -- if they could be made to
be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of
times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to
calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to
make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is
better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they
would have new qualitative features. <br />
If I look at your face I immediately recognize that I have seen it before.
(Actually, my friends will say I have chosen an unfortunate example here for the
subject of this illustration. At least I recognize that it is a <i>man</i> and
not an <i>apple</i>.) Yet there is no machine which, with that speed, can take a
picture of a face and say even that it is a man; and much less that it is the
same man that you showed it before -- unless it is exactly the same picture. If
the face is changed; if I am closer to the face; if I am further from the face;
if the light changes -- I recognize it anyway. Now, this little computer I carry
in my head is easily able to do that. The computers that we build are not able
to do that. The number of elements in this bone box of mine are enormously
greater than the number of elements in our "wonderful'' computers. But our
mechanical computers are too big; the elements in this box are microscopic. I
want to make some that are <i>sub</i>microscopic. <br />
If we wanted to make a computer that had all these marvelous extra
qualitative abilities, we would have to make it, perhaps, the size of the
Pentagon. This has several disadvantages. First, it requires too much material;
there may not be enough germanium in the world for all the transistors which
would have to be put into this enormous thing. There is also the problem of heat
generation and power consumption; TVA would be needed to run the computer. But
an even more practical difficulty is that the computer would be limited to a
certain speed. Because of its large size, there is finite time required to get
the information from one place to another. The information cannot go any faster
than the speed of light -- so, ultimately, when our computers get faster and
faster and more and more elaborate, we will have to make them smaller and
smaller. <br />
But there is plenty of room to make them smaller. There is nothing that I can
see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made
enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages.
<br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Miniaturization by evaporation</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
How can we make such a device? What kind of manufacturing processes would we
use? One possibility we might consider, since we have talked about writing by
putting atoms down in a certain arrangement, would be to evaporate the material,
then evaporate the insulator next to it. Then, for the next layer, evaporate
another position of a wire, another insulator, and so on. So, you simply
evaporate until you have a block of stuff which has the elements -- coils
and condensers, transistors and so on -- of exceedingly fine dimensions. <br />
But I would like to discuss, just for amusement, that there are other
possibilities. Why can't we manufacture these small computers somewhat like we
manufacture the big ones? Why can't we drill holes, cut things, solder things,
stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are
the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold
it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like
your wife's wrist watch, have you said to yourself, "If I could only train an
ant to do this!'' What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an
ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable
machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make.
<br />
Consider any machine -- for example, an automobile -- and ask about the
problems of making an infinitesimal machine like it. Suppose, in the particular
design of the automobile, we need a certain precision of the parts; we need an
accuracy, let's suppose, of 4/10,000 of an inch. If things are more inaccurate
than that in the shape of the cylinder and so on, it isn't going to work very
well. If I make the thing too small, I have to worry about the size of the
atoms; I can't make a circle of "balls'' so to speak, if the circle is too
small. So, if I make the error, corresponding to 4/10,000 of an inch, correspond
to an error of 10 atoms, it turns out that I can reduce the dimensions of an
automobile 4,000 times, approximately -- so that it is 1 mm. across. Obviously,
if you redesign the car so that it would work with a much larger tolerance,
which is not at all impossible, then you could make a much smaller device. <br />
It is interesting to consider what the problems are in such small machines.
Firstly, with parts stressed to the same degree, the forces go as the area you
are reducing, so that things like weight and inertia are of relatively no
importance. The strength of material, in other words, is very much greater in
proportion. The stresses and expansion of the flywheel from centrifugal force,
for example, would be the same proportion only if the rotational speed is
increased in the same proportion as we decrease the size. On the other hand, the
metals that we use have a grain structure, and this would be very annoying at
small scale because the material is not homogeneous. Plastics and glass and
things of this amorphous nature are very much more homogeneous, and so we would
have to make our machines out of such materials. <br />
There are problems associated with the electrical part of the system -- with
the copper wires and the magnetic parts. The magnetic properties on a very small
scale are not the same as on a large scale; there is the "domain'' problem
involved. A big magnet made of millions of domains can only be made on a small
scale with one domain. The electrical equipment won't simply be scaled down; it
has to be redesigned. But I can see no reason why it can't be redesigned to work
again. <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Problems of lubrication</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
Lubrication involves some interesting points. The effective viscosity of oil
would be higher and higher in proportion as we went down (and if we increase the
speed as much as we can). If we don't increase the speed so much, and change
from oil to kerosene or some other fluid, the problem is not so bad. But
actually we may not have to lubricate at all! We have a lot of extra force. Let
the bearings run dry; they won't run hot because the heat escapes away from such
a small device very, very rapidly. <br />
This rapid heat loss would prevent the gasoline from exploding, so an
internal combustion engine is impossible. Other chemical reactions, liberating
energy when cold, can be used. Probably an external supply of electrical power
would be most convenient for such small machines. <br />
What would be the utility of such machines? Who knows? Of course, a small
automobile would only be useful for the mites to drive around in, and I suppose
our Christian interests don't go that far. However, we did note the possibility
of the manufacture of small elements for computers in completely automatic
factories, containing lathes and other machine tools at the very small level.
The small lathe would not have to be exactly like our big lathe. I leave to your
imagination the improvement of the design to take full advantage of the
properties of things on a small scale, and in such a way that the fully
automatic aspect would be easiest to manage. <br />
A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs) suggests a very interesting possibility
for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it
would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the
mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and
"looks'' around. (Of course the information has to be fed out.) It finds out
which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other
small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some
inadequately-functioning organ. <br />
Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I
leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in
the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can't handle
directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts
and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set
of levers here, you control the "hands'' there, and can turn them this way and
that so you can handle things quite nicely. <br />
Most of these devices are actually made rather simply, in that there is a
particular cable, like a marionette string, that goes directly from the controls
to the "hands.'' But, of course, things also have been made using servo motors,
so that the connection between the one thing and the other is electrical rather
than mechanical. When you turn the levers, they turn a servo motor, and it
changes the electrical currents in the wires, which repositions a motor at the
other end. <br />
Now, I want to build much the same device -- a master-slave system which
operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by
modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the
"hands'' that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do
things at one- quarter scale anyway -- the little servo motors with little hands
play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times
smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size
tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again
relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view.
And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system,
through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can
now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands. <br />
Well, you get the principle from there on. It is rather a difficult program,
but it is a possibility. You might say that one can go much farther in one step
than from one to four. Of course, this has all to be designed very carefully and
it is not necessary simply to make it like hands. If you thought of it very
carefully, you could probably arrive at a much better system for doing such
things. <br />
If you work through a pantograph, even today, you can get much more than a
factor of four in even one step. But you can't work directly through a
pantograph which makes a smaller pantograph which then makes a smaller
pantograph -- because of the looseness of the holes and the irregularities of
construction. The end of the pantograph wiggles with a relatively greater
irregularity than the irregularity with which you move your hands. In going down
this scale, I would find the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph
on the end of the pantograph shaking so badly that it wasn't doing anything
sensible at all. <br />
At each stage, it is necessary to improve the precision of the apparatus. If,
for instance, having made a small lathe with a pantograph, we find its lead
screw irregular -- more irregular than the large-scale one -- we could lap the
lead screw against breakable nuts that you can reverse in the usual way back and
forth until this lead screw is, at its scale, as accurate as our original lead
screws, at our scale. <br />
We can make flats by rubbing unflat surfaces in triplicates together -- in
three pairs -- and the flats then become flatter than the thing you started
with. Thus, it is not impossible to improve precision on a small scale by the
correct operations. So, when we build this stuff, it is necessary at each step
to improve the accuracy of the equipment by working for awhile down there,
making accurate lead screws, Johansen blocks, and all the other materials which
we use in accurate machine work at the higher level. We have to stop at each
level and manufacture all the stuff to go to the next level -- a very long and
very difficult program. Perhaps you can figure a better way than that to get
down to small scale more rapidly. <br />
Yet, after all this, you have just got one little baby lathe four thousand
times smaller than usual. But we were thinking of making an enormous computer,
which we were going to build by drilling holes on this lathe to make little
washers for the computer. How many washers can you manufacture on this one
lathe? <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>A hundred tiny hands</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
When I make my first set of slave "hands'' at one-fourth scale, I am going to
make ten sets. I make ten sets of "hands,'' and I wire them to my original
levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now,
when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one
manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred "hands'' at the 1/16th
size. <br />
Where am I going to put the million lathes that I am going to have? Why,
there is nothing to it; the volume is much less than that of even one full-scale
lathe. For instance, if I made a billion little lathes, each 1/4000 of the scale
of a regular lathe, there are plenty of materials and space available because in
the billion little ones there is less than 2 percent of the materials in one big
lathe. <br />
It doesn't cost anything for materials, you see. So I want to build a billion
tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously,
drilling holes, stamping parts, and so on. <br />
As we go down in size, there are a number of interesting problems that arise.
All things do not simply scale down in proportion. There is the problem that
materials stick together by the molecular (Van der Waals) attractions. It would
be like this: After you have made a part and you unscrew the nut from a bolt, it
isn't going to fall down because the gravity isn't appreciable; it would even be
hard to get it off the bolt. It would be like those old movies of a man with his
hands full of molasses, trying to get rid of a glass of water. There will be
several problems of this nature that we will have to be ready to design for. <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Rearranging the atoms</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately
-- in the great future -- we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very <i>
atoms</i>, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one
by one the way we want them (within reason, of course; you can't put them so
that they are chemically unstable, for example). <br />
Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We
heat them and we do things on a large scale 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 arrangement that nature gives us. We haven't got anything, say, with a
"checkerboard'' arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly arranged 1,000
angstroms apart, or in some other particular pattern. <br />
What could we do with layered structures with just the right layers? What
would the properties of materials be if we could really arrange the atoms the
way we want them? They would be very interesting to investigate theoretically. I
can't see exactly what would happen, but I can hardly doubt that when we have
some <i>control</i> of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an
enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of
different things that we can do. <br />
Consider, for example, a piece of material in which we make little coils and
condensers (or their solid state analogs) 1,000 or 10,000 angstroms in a
circuit, one right next to the other, over a large area, with little antennas
sticking out at the other end -- a whole series of circuits. Is it possible, for
example, to emit light from a whole set of antennas, like we emit radio waves
from an organized set of antennas to beam the radio programs to Europe? The same
thing would be to <i>beam</i> the light out in a definite direction with very
high intensity. (Perhaps such a beam is not very useful technically or
economically.) <br />
I have thought about some of the problems of building electric circuits on a
small scale, and the problem of resistance is serious. If you build a
corresponding circuit on a small scale, its natural frequency goes up, since the
wave length goes down as the scale; but the skin depth only decreases with the
square root of the scale ratio, and so resistive problems are of increasing
difficulty. Possibly we can beat resistance through the use of superconductivity
if the frequency is not too high, or by other tricks. <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>Atoms in a small world</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
When we get to the very, very small world -- say circuits of seven atoms --
we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new
opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like <i>nothing</i> on a
large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down
and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws,
and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways.
We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy
levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc. <br />
Another thing we will notice is that, if we go down far enough, all of our
devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies of one
another. We cannot build two large machines so that the dimensions are exactly
the same. But if your machine is only 100 atoms high, you only have to get it
correct to one-half of one percent to make sure the other machine is exactly the
same size -- namely, 100 atoms high! <br />
At the atomic level, we have new kinds of forces and new kinds of
possibilities, new kinds of effects. The problems of manufacture and
reproduction of materials will be quite different. I am, as I said, inspired by
the biological phenomena in which chemical forces are used in repetitious
fashion to produce all kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author). <br />
The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the
possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate
any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it
has not been done because we are too big. <br />
Ultimately, we can do chemical synthesis. A chemist comes to us and says,
"Look, I want a molecule that has the atoms arranged thus and so; make me that
molecule.'' The chemist does a mysterious thing when he wants to make a
molecule. He sees that it has got that ring, so he mixes this and that, and he
shakes it, and he fiddles around. And, at the end of a difficult process, he
usually does succeed in synthesizing what he wants. By the time I get my devices
working, so that we can do it by physics, he will have figured out how to
synthesize absolutely anything, so that this will really be useless. <br />
But it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible (I think) for
a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down.
Give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where
the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and
biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do
things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed -- a development which I
think cannot be avoided. <br />
Now, you might say, "Who should do this and why should they do it?'' Well, I
pointed out a few of the economic applications, but I know that the reason that
you would do it might be just for fun. But have some fun! Let's have a
competition between laboratories. Let one laboratory make a tiny motor which it
sends to another lab which sends it back with a thing that fits inside the shaft
of the first motor. <br />
</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
<i>High school competition</i></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,arial,helvetica;">
Just for the fun of it, and in order to get kids interested in this field, I
would propose that someone who has some contact with the high schools think of
making some kind of high school competition. After all, we haven't even started
in this field, and even the kids can write smaller than has ever been written
before. They could have competition in high schools. The Los Angeles high school
could send a pin to the Venice high school on which it says, "How's this?'' They
get the pin back, and in the dot of the "i'' it says, "Not so hot.'' <br />
Perhaps this doesn't excite you to do it, and only economics will do so. Then
I want to do something; but I can't do it at the present moment, because I
haven't prepared the ground. 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. <br />
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. <br />
I do not expect that such prizes will have to wait very long for claimants.
<br />
</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07353795515318839209noreply@blogger.com0