Richard Feynman There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Richard Feynman There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. December 29, 1959 – Physicist Richard Feynman gives a speech entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", which is regarded as the birth of nanotechnology.

Richard Feynman (center) and Robert Oppenheimer (to viewer's right of Feynman) at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project.

"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959.

Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. The talk is considered to be a seminal event in the history of nanotechnology, as it inspired the conceptual beginnings of the field decades later.