There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Next: December 29, 2026
Think small. Then think smaller.
The story
Where it comes from
On 29 December 1959, at the American Physical Society's annual meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk called 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom'. He asked why we could not write all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, and imagined a future in which we could 'arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them'. This Story marks that talk. Little noticed for two decades, it is now often cited as an early vision of nanotechnology.
How it's celebrated
There is no organised observance. It is a good day to read the talk itself, which is short, funny and published by Caltech, or to look closely at something very small: a grain of salt under a magnifying glass, a butterfly's wing, or the circuit board inside an old gadget.
Did you know
- Feynman offered $1,000 for a working electric motor no bigger than a 1/64-inch cube; William McLellan built one in 1960 using a microscope, a watchmaker's lathe and a toothpick.
- His second $1,000 prize, for shrinking a page of text 25,000 times, waited until 1985, when the Stanford graduate student Tom Newman wrote the opening of A Tale of Two Cities small enough to read only by electron microscope.
- Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with the Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger, for their work on quantum electrodynamics.
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