Richard Feynman, 1959
“Feynman’s 1959 talk, entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’”, was delivered 50 years ago today, and the words I’ve quoted above are the first words in the first sentence of the first paper I wrote, almost 30 years ago, on what later became known as “nanotechnology”. Feynman read and discussed the [...]
The responsible party (left)
I got a pointer to a free, online educational resource today.
It deserves more attention.
The eyeballs of a few million students might be a good start. Students in elementary school, grad school, rural Africa… places like that.
It consists of 1000+ brief lectures on YouTube.
It centers on math, but goes beyond.
Here are a [...]Part 4 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
Rigid, structurally diverse bis-peptide oligomers C. Schafmeister, JACS, 2006
In this post, I’d like to outline the promise of fabrication technologies that are within reach of [...]Part of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
I’ve updated my recent post, “The promise that launched the field of nanotechnology”, with the following graphic and caption:
Engines of Creation launched a wave of excitement [...]Part 3 of a series prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
Lathe, 1911 A machine tool, used to make machines
In my view, the most attractive way forward in developing advanced molecular machine systems is by exploiting the molecular machine systems that are available today. Historically, [...]
NIH defunds young scientists
I recently wrote about the trend away from funding young scientists as independent investigators, with a graph of age distributions at NIH and related observations here. There’s been a lively discussion at the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog. I posted a link there to an NIH dataset [XLS spreadsheet], [...]Part 2.1 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
A commenter on the previous post has aired the often-mentioned basement-breakthrough scenario for achieving high-level molecular manufacturing. This scenario makes no sense, and I probably [...]Part 2 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
John Stewart Mill Brain debugger
As cognitive psychologists know, we human beings suffer from multiple, systematic cognitive biases, aberrations of intellectual vision that can be corrected, [...]