纳米技术的首介绍章文.docVIP

Theres Plenty of Room at the Bottom An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics by Richard P. Feynman This transcript of the classic talk that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at theCalifornia Institute of Technology (Caltech) was first published in Caltech Engineering and Science, Volume 23:5, February 1960, pp 22-36. It has been made available on the web at /nanotech/feynman.html with their kind permission. The scanned original is available. The Wikipedia entry on Feynmans talk. Information on the Feynman Prizes Search YouTube for Richard Feynman For an account of the talk and how people reacted to it, see chapter 4 of Nano! by Ed Regis, Little/Brown 1995. An excellent technical introduction to nanotechnology is Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing, and computation by K. Eric Drexler, Wiley 1992. The Feynman Lectures on Physics are available online. I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman, in designing a way to obtain higher pressures, opened up another new field and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind.I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense of, What are the strange particles?) but it is more like solid-state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most important is that it would have an enormous number of technical a