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First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of this slightly enlarged version of Feynman's famous and visionary Caltech after-dinner lecture, 'There's plenty of room at the bottom,' which represents the birth of nanotechnology, the field of applied science involving manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. "The revolutionary Feynman vision . . . launched the global nanotechnology race" (Drexler, p. 21). At the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in December 1959, Richard Feynman delivered an after-dinner lecture entitled 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom'. "The banquet speech would prove prescient. Feynman's lecture is widely accepted as spurring the field of nanotechnology, and the Nobel Prize Committee lauded it as visionary when they awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to researchers who assembled tiny motors made of molecules" (Kornei). Years before the term nanotechnology would be coined, Feynman laid out the principal problems and potentials of the field. He noted, "I will not discuss how we are going to do it, but only that it is possible in principle in other words what is possible according to the laws of physics." Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. Feynman laid out challenge after challenge: reducing the Encyclopedia Britannica to a pinhead, making an electron microscope that could see individual atoms, building a microscopic computer, and even "swallowing the doctor": building a tiny, ingestible surgical robot. In an era when computers filled entire rooms, what Feynman proposed seemed nearly unfathomable: "I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately in the great future we can arrange atoms the way we want; all the way down!" A transcript of 'Plenty of room' was published by the Caltech magazine Engineering & Science in February 1960; this is very rare indeed (we are not aware of any copy of the journal having appeared on the market). The magazine Saturday Review ran a brief synopsis in April 1960 with the title 'The Wonders That Await a Micro-Microscope,' and this was followed by the present article, a condensed version which contained comments that had not been in the Engineering & Science article, but which retained the heart of Feynman's argument. Drexler, 'Nanotechnology: From Feynman to Funding,' Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 24 (2004), pp. 21-27. Kornei, 'The Beginning of Nanotechnology at the 1959 APS Meeting,' APS News, November 2016. 8vo, original printed wrappers (very slightly worn and soiled, slightly browned at edges). A very good copy.
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