Nanotechnology

   Many sources, especially in English, the first mention of methods that will later be called nanotechnology, is associated with a famous speech by Richard Feynman, "There are many places at the bottom" (born «There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom»), he made in 1959 California Institute of Technology at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. Richard Feynman suggested that perhaps mechanically moving single atoms with the help of the manipulator of appropriate size, at least, this process does not run counter to the currently known physical laws.

   This manipulator, he proposed to do the following way. Must construct a mechanism would create its copy, only an order of magnitude smaller. Create a smaller mechanism must again create a copy of itself again on the order of magnitude smaller, and so on, until the size of the mechanism would not be commensurate with the size of the order of one atom. This will need to make changes in the device of this mechanism as gravitational forces acting in the macro will have less and less influence, and strength of intermolecular interactions and van der Waals forces will increasingly affect the operation of machinery. The last phase - the resulting mechanism will bring your copy of the individual atoms. In principle, the number of such copies is unlimited, it will be possible in a short time to create an arbitrary number of such machines. These machines will be in the same way poatomnoy assembly gathered makroveschi. This will make things cheaper in the order - such robots (nanorobots) will need to give only the necessary number of molecules and energy, and write a program to build the necessary items. Until now, no one can deny this possibility, but no one has yet to establish such mechanisms.

   In an investigation of this possibility, there were hypothetical doomsday, which suggest that nanorobots will absorb the entire biomass of the Earth, carrying out its program of propagation (so-called "gray goo" or "gray slime").

   The first assumption of the possibility of research facilities at the atomic level can be found in the book «Opticks» Isaac Newton, published in 1704. In the book Newton hoped that microscopes of the future ever be able to explore the "secrets of corpuscles.

   The term "nanotechnology" used the Norio Taniguchi in 1974. He called this term manufacture a few nanometers in size. In the 1980's the term used Eric K. Drexler in his book: "Machinery of creation: coming era of nanotechnology» («Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology») and «Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation». Central to his research played mathematical calculations, by which it was possible to analyze the work unit sizes of a few nanometers.