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Modern Times

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on July 7, 2008 at 12:37:41 pm
 

The converntional narrative for a nanotechnology origin story starts with US physicist Richard Feynman and his famous 1959 lecutre to the American Physical Society in 1959, titled 'There's lots of room at the bottom'. Next, a Japanese engineer named Norio Taniguchi in his paper for the Japan Society for Precision Engineering in 1974 coined the phrase nanotechnology[1].This is followed by the mention of K. Eric Drexler a US engineer who wrote the book, Engines of Creation, which lauded the coming nanotechnology age and has haunted him since its publication in 1986.[2]

 

The basics are not disputed however, it has been pointed out that science fiction writers got there first.

 

Contrast this passage from the widely believed ur text for nanotechnology'There’s lots of room at the bottom',

 

 A hundred tiny hands

When I make my first set of slave ``hands'' at one-fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of ``hands,'' and I wire them to my original levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred ``hands'' at the 1/16th size.[3]

 

with this description of Richard Heinlein's 1942 short story,

In Waldo, Heinlein (1942/1965) described a process of molecular mainpulation, in whihc smaller and smaller devices are created by Waldo to enable hime to "directly manipulate microscopic materials by means of his own human hands."[4]

 

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia (n. d.) ‘Nanotechnology’. (Accessed April 18, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology)
  2. Drexler, K. E. (1987) Engines of Creation. (originally published 1986, paperback edition 1987) New York, New York, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing.
  3. Feynman, R. P. (1959) ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom; an Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics’, transcript of talk given at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, December 29, 1959 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). (Accessed April 15, 2007 from http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html)
  4. Bowman, D.M., Hodge, G.A., and Binks, P. ‘Are We Really the Prey? Nanotechnology as Science and Science Fiction.’ Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, December 2007, 27 (6), pp. 435-445.

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