What is the future of Nano Technology?
In 1959, a scientist named Richard Feynman predicted the future of nanotechnology. He predicted what needed to be done and how it might be done, all before anyone had really seen an atom with a microscope. Feynman looked into the future and predicted how technology might make things smaller and smaller. He didn’t know the exact size of atoms, but he did know that computing machines are very large and fill rooms. He wondered if it was possible to make them very small, making them little wires, little elements. By little he meant little for instance the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter today the smallest parts inside a computer chip are about 100 nanometers. What’s a nanometer one billion of a meter that means if you laid 1 million of these computer parts side-by-side they would measure only one inch across. He wondered if in the future, these parts will be only a few atoms computers will be hundreds of times faster. He also considered the final question as to whether ultimately in the great future we can arrange the atoms the way we want. In 1989, Don Eichler and his colleagues at IBM did just that, they moved individual atoms to spell out IBM 40 years after Fineman predicted the future. Today, scientists are using nanotechnology and making things smaller and smaller.