December 29: Feynman's talk openning the nanotechnology era (1959)

Richard Feynman

The renowned physicist Richard Phillips Feynman gave a lecture entitled "There's plenty of room at the bottom" at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman presented the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. This lecture is regarded as the birth of nanotechnology. Eric Drexler took the Feynman's concept of a billion tiny factories and added the concepts of copies of themselves with computer-aided control, which appeared in his book "Engines of creation: The coming era of nanotechnology", published in 1986. (By the way, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his contribution to the quantum electrodynamics.)