feynman

Richard P. Feynman

Information Storage

On December 29th 1959 Richard P. Feynman gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech. This was one of the first steps in progressing towards the developments of nanotechnology, and inspired many of the modern researchers. Here he proposed that the 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica could be fitted onto the head of a pin. He reached this conclusion through the following steps:

1. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across.
2. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
3. All is needed is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopedia by 25,000 times.
4. The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch--roughly the diameter of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopedia.
5. When this is demagnified by 25,000 times, it is still 80 angstroms in diameter--32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal.
6. These dots that make of the writing in the Encyclopedia contain therefore in their area 1,000 atoms.
7. Feynman proposes that therefore each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by photoengraving (I'm assuming that this is an obsolete technology, so we no doubt have more precise/efficient ways of doing this today).
8. Therefore there is no question, says Feynmann, that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Feynmann went on to theorize how to read information encoded on this scale, saying we needed to increase the power and decrease the cost of electron microscopes. We have greatly increased the power and control of electron microscopes today, although they are still extremely expensive and only used by sufficiently funded commercial research companies, or limited amount of sufficiently funded colleges.

We've currently increased the power of the electron microscope with new technologies, as well as developed a bulk means of manipulating nano-sized matter: the atomic force microscope. These will be discussed in the next section.

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