with admittedly spectacular results. Physicists ripped apart, smashed, and bombarded the atom until they were fairly sure that they could be predictably uncertain of its workings however, in Richard Feynman suggested that some of the same techniques made available through modern physics might be used to design and build novel types of machinery from the atom up. Up until scientists and engineers working at or below the nanometer scale were primarily concerned with the theory of breaking very small things or at least whacking them as hard as possible...

with admittedly spectacular results. Up until scientists and engineers working at or below the nanometer scale were primarily concerned with the theory of breaking very small things or at least whacking them as hard as possible... This reversal of the classical strategy of fabrication, which tends to whittle down large objects until they roughly approximate the desired product, is the fundamental concept upon which nanotechnology is based. After Feynmans address, there was brief period of excitement involving alot of dreamy talk and reprint in Engineering and Science, and then everyone went quietly back to finding out who could throw subatomic particle the hardest.

Up until scientists and engineers working at or below the nanometer scale were primarily concerned with the theory of breaking very small things or at least whacking them as hard as possible... with admittedly spectacular results. Physicists ripped apart, smashed, and bombarded the atom until they were fairly sure that they could be predictably uncertain of its workings however, in Richard Feynman suggested that some of the same techniques made available through modern physics might be used to design and build novel types of machinery from the atom up.