Did you ever wonder who first got the idea to make nanometer sized things? Well that is a complicated question. Was it the folks that first made buckyballs (that would be Richard Smalley, Harry Kroto and Robert Curl) or how about carbon nanotubes (Sumio Iijima). OK, then how about those scientists who first moved atoms around (that would be Don Eigler and his colleagues). No, the first guy to really challenge the world to think about nanotechnology was Richard Feynman.

Who was Richard Feynman? Well, he was born in New York City, went to college at MIT and right out of college joined the most famous physicists in the world to help out with the Manhattan Project and build an atomic bomb. He then goes on to become a famous professor at the California Institute of Technology, but along the way learns how to play the bongos and ones his skills on how to tell people about science without making it sound too complicated. So he was a pretty cool guy

In 1959, Feynman gave a now-famous talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. Back then, the first satellite was just being launched into space and it would take another two years to put a man into space. Transistors, which now are like 100 nanometers in size (too small to see with the naked eye), were huge—about the size of a pencil eraser. Feynman never used the word “nanotechnology,” as the word didn’t even exist at that time (it was about 15 years later that a Japanese scientist, Norio Taniguchi first used the word ‘nanotechnology’). But he challenged the scientific community to think about how to “write the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin.” Then he told everyone just how he would do it—how to store information by arranging the atoms one at a time. It would take another forty years for someone to really do it. And they did it almost the same way that Feynman said it could be done. In 1965, Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics—not for his predictions about nanotechnology, but for his work in quantum electrodynamics, QED (calculating how different particles interact with each other).

One of his last accomplishments before he died in 1988 was to demonstrate what caused the space shuttle Challenger to crash. He did it by taking a piece of rubber from one of the booster rockets, dunking it into a glass of icewater, and showing that when it was very cold, it got really brittle.

In 2005, a commemorative stamp honoring Richard Feynman was printed by the United States Postal Service. And on that stamp somewhere, written very small, is a secret message related to QED. Maybe you can find it and write back to us (info@nanooze.org) and tell us what you found out about it.

Links:
Watch an introduction to Richard Feynman on Youtube!
Read more about the amazing Richard Feynman.

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