Published by Australian Academy of Science
Nanoscience – working small, thinking big Box 1 | Room at the bottom

The idea of changing the world by working at the nanoscale is not new. In 1959, one of the world's greatest physicists, the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, discussed the possibilities of building from the bottom up in a famous lecture at the California Institute of Technology, entitled 'There's plenty of room at the bottom'. In it he predicted that one day we could use tools to make smaller tools suitable for making yet smaller tools until researchers had tools that were just the right size for directly manipulating atoms and molecules.

'Up till now,' he said, 'we've been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on a large scale with them...But we must always accept some atomic arrangement that nature gives us...I can hardly doubt that when we have some control of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of different things that we can do.'

This was a momentous prediction: Feynman was forecasting that we would one day be creating and modifying materials at their fundamental level as opposed to just reworking nature's products.

The term 'nanotechnology' was first coined by Eric Drexler in 1986, in a book called Engines of Creation. Drexler imagined molecular manufacturing being carried out by tiny machines called 'nanoassemblers'. These would build self-replicating nanomachines – robots that would produce copies of themselves if supplied with the right materials.

Related sites

• There's plenty of room at the bottom by Richard P. Feynman (Zyvex, USA)

• Engines of creation – the coming era of nanotechnology by K Eric Drexler (Foresight Institute, USA)

Other boxes

Box 2. Nanomanipulation

Box 3. In nature's footsteps