The Reluctant Visionary
Nanotechnology-driven manufacturing will change our world in fundamental ways—but we shouldn’t get too worked up about it.
NOVEMBER 27, 2013 by PHIL BOWERMASTER
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In 1959, Richard Feynman delivered a lecture with the provocative title “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Speaking at a meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech, the Nobel-laureate-to-be speculated about the possibility of manipulating matter at the atomic level via exquisitely small machines. Would it be possible, Feynman asked, for such machinery to configure atoms themselves, producing atomically precise outputs? Might we one day have billions of submicroscopic factories working in parallel to produce anything and everything we need?
It was a profound and exciting idea, and yet one that received very little serious attention in the years that followed, until an MIT student named K. Eric Drexler took up the cause in the 1980s. Working within Marvin Minsky’s MIT Media Lab, Drexler earned a Ph.D. in molecular nanotechnology—the first such degree ever awarded anywhere. Along the way he wrote the bestselling Engines of Creation (1986), which outlined his vision of nanotechnology for non-technical audiences, and the technical treatise Nanosystems (1991), which got into the nuts and bolts of nanotech.
Engines of Creation kicked off a worldwide nanotechnology craze
Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-reluctant-visionary#ixzz2lsaUlgGn
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