Science has kicked out the bottom and blown off the top of the narrowly circumscribed perceptual world in which we live. With ever more sensitive instruments for viewing and probing both microspace and macrospace, science not only opens and explores new spacial territories, but it has also fostered in microspace a technological gold rush that has redefined economic prosperity. We may not be able to visualize microspace, but society is already trembling at the onslaught of microelectronic technologies constructed in and functioning in microspace but directly impacting our own lives in myriad ways. Richard Feynmann (1918--1988), who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, is often identified as the first to speak about the rich potential of microspace. In a 1959 speech titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," he said, "In the year 2000, when people look at this age, they will wonder why it was that it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began to move seriously in this direction [toward microspace]."
Feynmann, with his brilliance, could visualize the microspace revealed to us by our scientific instruments. At the time the physicist spoke, the integrated circuit combining just a few transistors onto a single chip had only recently been invented. Since then, the field of microelectronics has claimed some of the territory at the bottom, as seen, for example in Intel's top-of-the-line Pentium III processor, which has some 10 million transistors on a single chip.
Surprisingly, if Feynmann were here now, he could still speak of "plenty of room at the bottom." Although the size of a transistor has shrunk some 2.5 million times since 1959, the electron remains more than 1 billion times smaller than today's best transistor.
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