2. That was 50 years ago!

In 1959, the famous physicist Richard Feymann (winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics), in a landmark speech to the US Academy of Sciences entitled "There's a lot of space down there", announced with disconcerting confidence: "Why couldn't we write all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin? In the same speech, he asked, "What if we could move atoms, one by one, and assemble them in the way we wanted? He was already thinking about applications. He anticipated the fact that modern physics puts no limits on observing atoms one by one, or manipulating them individually. It was more than 25 years after this landmark speech before applied nanotechnology research began in 1985. The work of Richard Smalley, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, led to the discovery of a...