THE HOTTEST FIELD OF STUDY TODAY IS NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at the realm of 1 to 100 nanometers. (note: a piece of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.) At the nanoscale, matter acts differently from the individual atomic and macroscopic scales, so some unique properties are available for use in the study and applications of physics and biology. Richard Feynman is most closely identified with this.

He was born in 1918 and as a young man was part of the Manhattan Project. In 1965 he won a Nobel Prize, for Physics, for work in “quantum Theory electrodynamics.”

On December 29, 1959, this influential American physicist, Richard P. Feynman, presented a talk to the American Physical Society entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics." What he was getting at in this paper was that maybe it was possible to explore more deeply into the study of very small entities and, as we said, begin to work finer and maybe more precisely. One major application of nanotechnology today is in the field of medicine, and in fact the knowledge gained from research of natural nanomachines, such as bacteria, has proven essential to the field. In this way, it has developed some close connections with biophysics. It’s theorized that man-made nanomachines could travel through the human being to repair damage to small unreachable areas of the body that are currently untreatable. That sounds like science fiction doesn’t it? Well it is already close to possible.

Richard died in 1988, but not without giving the scientific community and the world something quite incredible to think about, research and apply. He is certainly remembered by scientists of this generation for explaining the most complex science and theories in the simplest ways. Maybe hundreds of years from now he will be remembered for his early work in nano physics. Yes, he too has been called one of the great minds of the 20th century.