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Richard Feynman "Tiny Machines" Nanotechnology Lecture - aka "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom"

Muon Ray · 543.6K views · 2012-08-23 · 1:19:47

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Overview

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

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HN points to it when discussing nanobots and microscale physics, including how things behave at tiny scales.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2015–2026

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What people said

pazimzadeh · 2026-04 · Recommendation

at the scale that it operates, the flagella is more a drill than a propeller there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small [VIDEO]

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morphle · 2024-03 · Reference

The sequential process performance ceiling will be set by physical limits. Photons at high frequenties have too much energy, for example gamma rays. The practical ceiling will be set by manufacturing limitations for the next few decades: can we build structures atom by atom? [1] [1] Richard Feynman "Tiny Machines" Nanotechnology Lecture - aka "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" [VIDEO]

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pazimzadeh · 2022-09 · Reference

2030 seems way too early, but Feynman predicted the nanobots a while ago: [VIDEO] There are at least two ways to go about this: 1 - keep making computers smaller until they are ingestible and somehow interface with biology 2 - learn enough about existing biology to be able to re-program cells for our purposes However, to me the most exciting type of projects are the ones that merge these approaches, like an ingestible pill shaped device containing a compartment filled with bacteria engineered for particular tasks. In one case the bacteria were made to glow in the presence of heme, and the device contains a light sensor as well as bluetooth transmitter to relay the data to the smartphone in real time. [LINK] As Feyman mentioned, this type of device could also be made to capture a biopsy, perform certain micro-surgeries, etc aka Swallow the Doctor. But without even even getting to the super fancy nanorobots, it seems to me there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in simply chemically modifying or repackaging existing drugs for tissue-specific application. This would enable increasing the dosage of existing medication without increasing side effects. That seems like something that could happen by 2030 and it would revolutionize medicine.

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Sources

Video by Muon Ray, played through YouTube.

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