Richard Feynman (1918–1988)

Richard Feynman was considered a visionary for being one of the first scientist to predict the emergence of nanotechnology. One of the most famous physicists in the post–World War II era, Feynman obtained an undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and carried out doctoral work at Princeton University. Early in his career, Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project at the then-secret national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where, on 16 July 1945, he was among the first to observe the detonation of an atomic bomb. By 1948, while working as a professor at Cornell University, Feynman had reconstructed a large part of quantum mechanics and electrodynamics to resolve the meaningless results that the old quantum electrodynamic theory (QED) sometimes produced. In addition, to describe QED more efficiently, he created a type of graph—now known as Feynman diagrams—to represent the interaction of elementary particles.

In 1959, while teaching at the California Institute of Technology, Feynman gave a talk titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he predicted the rise of a field of science in which objects would be manipulated and controlled on an atomic level. This seminal talk was one of the first to predict the emergence of the field of nanotechnology. To achieve construction on an atomic scale, Feynman proposed a tool-building process in which each tool produced 10 new tools that were one-quarter the size of the original. He theorized that in this manner it would be possible to produce millions of tools that work on an atomic scale. He also pointed out that as size decreased in each generation, the tools would have to be redesigned since friction and gravity would matter less and intermolecular (van der Waals) attractions would become a concern.

As part of his talk Feynman emphasized the need for interdisciplinary collaboration in the sciences. He urged physicists, for example, to invent an electron microscope one hundred times better than what was currently available to assist biologists and chemists in observing cells and chemical structures. (Although this particular goal has not been achieved, scientists can now manipulate atoms with an electron microscope.) To encourage innovation in scaling-down technology, Feynman also issued two challenges to young scientists: to rewrite a page of a book 1/25,000 smaller on a linear scale; and to build a rotating electric motor that could be enclosed in a 1/64-cubic-inch area. He promised $1,000 to the first person to succeed in each challenge; both prizes were claimed by 1985.

Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his work in QED. He also received the Albert Einstein Award from Princeton University; the Einstein Award from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and the Ernst Orlando Lawrence Award.