Richard Feynman, the futurists and the nanotechnology initiative

On 29 December 1959, Richard P. Feynman gave an after-dinner talk at an annual American Physical Society meeting, entitled " There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom ."One attendee later told science writer Ed Regis that the puzzled physicists in the room feared Feynman meant that “there are plenty of lousy jobs in physics."Feynman said that he really wanted to discuss “the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.” In short, a half-century ago he anticipated what we now call nanotechnology —the manipulation of matter at the level of billionths of a meter.Some historians depict the speech as the start of this now-burgeoning field of research. Yet Feynman didn’t use the word “nanotechnology” himself, and his lecture went for years almost entirely unmentioned in the scientific literature until the 1980s ( Editor’s note: Physics Today referred to it in 1979 ).The story of how his talk was forgotten and then, decades later, inserted into the history of nanotechnology is worth understanding less because of what it tells us about the past than because of what it hints about the future, a future in which billions of dollars in research and development funds are at stake.

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