Nanotechnology
On December 29, 1959 at the meeting for the American Physical
Society, Richard Feynman gave a talk that basically sparked a new science:
nanotechnology. At the time no one was really doing any research in this area.
Since then a whole new area of research has been founded. In his speech he
did not define how we could do this incredible task of making robots merely
atoms in size. He did give some possible solutions to how someone may go about
building these amazing things, but the most important things he said were
that in the world of physics there is nothing that says that this couldn't
be done. He talks about writing on such a small scale that the information
in every book ever written could be but onto the head of one pin.
He later talks about making a set of hands robotically work but are 1/4 the
size of his hands, then taking those and making another set 1/4 the size of
those and so on. He also talks about building a machine atom by atom. A very
slow process, but this miniscule machine could build another tiny machine
and so on until there are millions of them