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lecture, later published in topic form and reprinted in many countries, he first
proposed the idea of an aperiodic crystal—a microsystem of large information
capacity. In fact, he anticipated the principle of storing genetic information in the
DNA structure, noting that:
A small molecule might be called “the germ of a solid,” Starting from such a small solid
germ, there seem to be two different ways of building up larger and larger associations. One
is the comparatively dull way of repeating the same structure in three directions again and
again. That is the way followed in a growing crystal. Once the periodicity is established,
there is no definite limit to the size of the aggregate. The other way is that of building up a
more and more extended aggregate without the dull service of repetition. That is the case of
the more and more complicated organic molecule in which every atom, and every group of
atoms, plays an individual role, not entirely equivalent to that of many others (as is the case
in a periodic structure). We might quite properly call that an aperiodic crystal or solid and
express our hypothesis by saying: “We believe a gene—or perhaps the whole chromosome
fibre—to be an aperiodic solid.”
The emergence of nanotechnology as a separate field of science and technology
is usually associated with the outstanding physicist of the twentieth century,
Richard Feynman. On December 29, 1959, he made a presentation at the meeting
of the American Physical Society entitled “Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” In this
lecture he drew attention of the physics community to the fact that among the
various areas of physics research, there is one area that has not yet come into the
view of physicists although it offers a wide variety of scientific and technical
applications. This area is the detailed investigation of micro- and nano-sized
objects. As a first example Feynman considered the problem of compact infor-
mation storage—
Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia
Brittanica on the head of a pin
? Answering this question, Feynman pointed out that
if one magnified the head of a pin (having the diameter of 1/16 of an inch) by 25,000
diameters, the area of the head of the pin would then be equal to the area of all the
pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The smallest element of the text, a dot, would
contain in its area 1,000 atoms. Feynman went on to address a number of oppor-
tunities that constructing and using super miniaturized devices would offer. Those
include ultradense recording and storing of information, the development of min-
iaturized computers, and the creation of autonomous tools that can perform surgery
directly in the human body. According to Feynman “it would be interesting in
surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside
the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and 'looks' around (Fig.
1.3
)
Other
small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some
inadequately-functioning organ.” In his lecture Feynman mentioned the possibility
of synthesizing chemical substances directly from atoms, by adding them sequen-
tially to the structure being created. In general, thinking about the many Feynman
predictions that have actually been implemented today, one perceives in a new light
the final words of his lecture: “In the year 2000 [people] will wonder why it was not
until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.”
The term “nanotechnology” was first coined in 1974 by Norio Taniguchi of the
University of Tokyo. In its original meaning this term referred to precision
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