Feynman's Room at the Bottom

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 29 December 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave an after-dinner talk at Caltech titled There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, arguing that no law of physics forbade manipulating individual atoms directly, and offering cash prizes to anyone who could build a working electric motor smaller than a fraction of an inch or write a page of text small enough to fit on the head of a pin. Feynman never used the word nanotechnology, and the talk was barely noticed for the next two decades; it entered the field's own origin story only in retrospect, once other researchers had independently arrived at the questions Feynman had raised for fun. What makes the lecture worth reading now is not that it predicted the field correctly in every detail, but that it correctly identified the one thing every later researcher would need to believe before starting: that the smallness of an atom was not, by itself, a reason nobody could ever build with them.