Richard Feynman's Talk

Andrew Whitaker

Tony Hey, Patrick Walters

What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale…. 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. Richard Feynman Richard Feynman and nanotechnology In 1959, in an after dinner speech at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Pasadena, Richard Feynman set out a remarkable vision of the future in a talk entitled ‘There's plenty of room at the bottom.’ The talk was subtitled ‘an invitation to enter a new field of physics’ and marked the beginning of what is now known as ‘nanotechnology’. Nanotechnology is concerned with the manipulation of matter at the scale of a nanometre -a thousand millionth of a metre. Atoms are typically a few tenths of a nanometre in size. Feynman emphasized that such an endeavour does not need new 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 are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven't yet gotten around to it. In his talk Feynman offered two prizes of $1000 each – one ‘to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor which is only 1/64 inch cube’, and a second ‘to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25000 smaller’ He had to pay out on both prizes – the first less than a year later, to Bill McLellan, a Caltech alumnus.

Daisuke Fujiwara

Ronak Tiwari, Amir Hossein Moadab, Pavithra Sripathanallur Murali

There’s plenty of room at the bottom was the title of the lecture that Richard Feynman delivered in 1959. His talk at Caltech had more to do with what the future of information storage looked like, and that there was plenty of room available at the atomic level for the same. In the interest of this article however, we take a generalist view on the title of his talk and interpret it as “. . . plenty of room [for exploration] . . . ”. While Feynman was correct and we’ve indeed witnessed the meteoric rise in storage capabilities, the room for exploration has definitely squeezed a bit lately, with the debut of Quantum Computers.

Tony Hey

The last lecture course that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman gave to students at Caltech was not on physics but on computer science. The course in 1983 was an overview of standard and not-so-standard topics in computer science, all given in Feynman’s inimitable style. This talk will begin by giving an overview of Feynman’s long-time interest in computing - starting with his time at Los Alamos during the war through to his suggestion of simulating physics on a quantum computer at a ‘Physics of Computation Conference at MIT in 1981 and his acting as a consultant for the parallel computer company, Thinking Machines. The talk will conclude with a summary of Feynman’s long-term interest in the physical limits to computation and the exemplary way he could communicate complex ideas to all types of audience.