There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Today there was an article on LiveScience about “The World’s Smallest Car” (about 4 nanometers across). After reading this and some related articles:The World’s Smallest Motor
The World’s Smallest Robot
The World’s Smallest Refrigerator

I could not help but be reminded of Richard Feynman’s seminal talk, entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” given on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). “

“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.

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.

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.“

A funny solution to the problem perhaps, yet, it is only one of many. This talk by Feynman is among the most important milestones in Nanotechnology and thus the Future of Progress — making it a truly great read.