2 Room at the Bottom , Plenty of Tyranny at the Top

Richard Feynman is generally regarded as one of the fathers of nanotechnology. In giving his landmark presentation to the American Physical Society on December 29, 1959, at Caltech, his title line was, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” At that time, Feynman extended an invitation for “manipulating and controlling things on a small scale, thereby entering a new field of physics which was bottomless, like low-temperature physics.” He started with the question, can we “write the Lord’s prayer on the head of a pin,” and immediately extended the goal to the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. By following the Gedanken Experiment, Feynman showed that there is no physical law against the realization of such goals: if you magnify the head of a pin by 25,000 diameters, its surface area is then equal to that of all the pages in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Feynman’s dreams of writing small have all been fulfilled and even exceeded in the past decades. Since the advent of scanning tunneling microscopy, as introduced by Binnig and Rohrer, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that single atoms can not only be conveniently represented for the human eye but manipulated as well. Thus, it is conceivable to store all the books in the world (which Feynman estimates to contain 1015 bits of information) on the area of a credit card! The encyclopedia, having around 109 bits of information, can be written on about 1/100 the surface area of the head of a pin. One need not look to atomic writing to achieve astonishing results: current microchips contain close to 100 million transistors. A small number of such chips could not only store large amounts of information (such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica); they can process it with GHz speed as well. To find a particular word takes just a few nanoseconds. Typical disk hard drives can store much more than the semiconductor chips, with a trade-off for retrieval speeds. Feynman’s vision for storing and retrieving information on a small scale was very close to these numbers. He did not ask himself what the practical difficulties were in achieving these goals, but rather asked only what the principal limitations were. Even he could not possibly foresee the ultimate consequences of writing small and reading fast: the creation of the Internet. Sifting through large databases is, of course, what is done during Internet browsing. It is not only the Karl Hess University of Illinois