Conception
Feynman considered a number of interesting ramifications of a general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. He was particularly interested in the possibilities of denser computer circuitry, and microscopes which could see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscopes. These ideas were later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope, the atomic force microscope and other examples of probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede, created by researchers at IBM.
Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to make nanoscale machines that "arrange the atoms the way we want", and do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation.
He also presented the "weird possibility" of "swallowing the doctor," an idea which he credited in the essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs. This concept involved building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop. This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in perhaps a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations. He uses the analogy of a pantograph as a way of scaling down items. This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1942 story Waldo.
As the sizes got smaller, one would have to redesign some tools, because the relative strength of various forces would change. Although gravity would become unimportant, surface tension would become more important, Van der Waals attraction would become important, etc. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during his talk. Nobody has yet attempted to implement this thought experiment, although it has been noted that some types of biological enzymes and enzyme complexes (especially ribosomes) function chemically in a way close to Feynman's vision.
Read more about this topic: There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom
Famous quotes containing the word conception:
“Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated ... logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Consider what effects which might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)