Like nature it seems that human ingenuity rushes to fill a vacuum. Physicist Richard Feyman recognized such an opportunity in an address that he gave to the American Physical Society in December 1959, entitled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics. Pointing out the fertile and as yet unexplored terrain of ultra-miniaturization, he issued a challenge that has since pre-occupied several generations of scientists. “What I want to talk about,” he said in an address to the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, “is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.”

Feyman speculated that it should be possible to make remote-controlled miniature tools that could be used to build new tools that were even smaller. By applying this process in successive steps, he thought that it would ultimately be possible to construct infinitesimally small machines.

Achieving such a task would have been miraculous, but Feynman took the challenge one step further. What if we could actually move individual atoms around, he said, and position them precisely? “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.” By manipulating atoms, Feynman thought, we would eventually be able to assemble any material from its smallest elements.

Feynman announced to the audience that he was offering two prizes: $1,000 to the first person who could build an operating electric motor within a 1/64 inch cube; another $1,000 to the first person who could reduce the information on the page of a book to an area 1/25,000 smaller, and read it using an electron microscope.

An engineer claimed the first prize in 1960, using conventional techniques to construct a very small motor. A Stanford University graduate student claimed the second in 1985, writing the opening text of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities on a page 1/160 of a millimetre in length, using electron beam lithography.

Since Richard Feynman’s address in 1959, nanotechnology has become a burgeoning science. The Institute for Molecular Manufacturing was formed in 1991, as a non-profit foundation that conducts research in nanoscale manufacturing. The Foresight Institute, a non-profit educational organization, has awarded Feynman prizes for new breakthroughs in nanotechnology since 1993.

Inventor of the term ‘nanotechnology,’ a pioneer in the field, chairman of the Foresight Institute and research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, Dr. Eric Drexler is the leading champion of this science. His book – Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology – first published in 1986, has become a classic.

“Our ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology,” Drexler says in the book’s opening paragraphs. “We have come far in our atom arranging, from chipping flint for arrowheads to machining aluminum for spaceships. We take pride in our technology, with our lifesaving drugs and desktop computers. Yet our spacecraft are still crude, our computers are still stupid, and the molecules in our tissues still slide into disorder, first destroying health, then life itself. For all our advances in arranging atoms, we still use primitive methods. With our present technology, we are still forced to handle atoms in unruly herds.”

”But,” Drexler says, “the laws of nature leave plenty of room for progress, and the pressures of world competition are even now pushing us forward. For better or for worse, the greatest technological breakthrough in history is still to come.”

However preposterous Feynman’s challenge must have seemed in 1959, and however farfetched the vision described in Drexler’s book, nanoscience has reached a new level of legitimacy. In January 2000, President Clinton announced a $500-million National Nanotechnology Initiative that anticipates breakthroughs in “materials and manufacturing, nanoelectronics, medicine and healthcare, environment, energy, chemicals, biotechnology, agriculture, information technology, and national security.”

There’s plenty of room at the bottom, and we should have no fear that there is nothing left to invent.