2. Why think small?

Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics, made a visionary announcement in a famous article entitled "There's plenty of room at the bottom" about the future development of nanoscience and the importance of small scales: information storage, physics inspired by the wonderful world of biology. In this article, Feynman already highlighted the problems associated with Van der Waals interactions, which become dominant at the molecular scale, and the difficulty of lubrication at these small scales. Physicists and chemists specializing in colloids...