“Particles like these could recreate mechanical machines on a nanoscale”

In 1959, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman talked to a gathering of his peers from the American Physical Society about a concept that would become famous far beyond the sphere of theoretical physics. The lecture was called ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, and in it he imagined a world where vast amounts of information could be processed in tiny spaces and machines too small for the eye to see would perform difficult tasks. This was years before the first computer processor and decades before nanorobotics got started. We’ve still got a long way to go before we can deploy swarms of tiny robots to do our bidding, but in this issue you’ll see how far we’ve come.