Richard Feynman Introduces the World to Nanotechnology with Two Seminal Lectures (1959 & 1984)

in Physics, Technology | April 23rd, 2013

In Decem­ber of 1959, Richard Feyn­man gave a talk called “There’s Plen­ty of Room at the Bot­tom” at an annu­al meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Phys­i­cal Soci­ety at Cal­tech. In this famous lec­ture, Feyn­man laid the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions for the field now called nan­otech­nol­o­gy when he imag­ined a day when things could be minia­tur­ized — when huge amounts of infor­ma­tion could be encod­ed onto increas­ing­ly small spaces, and when machin­ery could be made con­sid­er­ably small­er and more com­pact. He asked his audi­ence:

I don’t know how to do this on a small scale in a prac­ti­cal way, but I do know that com­put­ing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of lit­tle wires, lit­tle ele­ments, and by lit­tle, I mean lit­tle?

Although some have ques­tioned the degree to which Feyn­man influ­enced the rise of nan­otech­nol­o­gy, his lec­ture is still seen as a sem­i­nal event in the short his­to­ry of the nano field. It’s impor­tant enough that, 25 years lat­er, Feyn­man was invit­ed to give an updat­ed ver­sion of “There’s Plen­ty of Room at the Bot­tom” at a week­long sem­i­nar held at the Esalen Insti­tute in Octo­ber, 1984.

This time around, he called his talk “Tiny Machines.” And while stick­ing close to the 1959 script, Feyn­man’s revised lec­ture shows what tech­no­log­i­cal advances had been made since he first out­lined his vision for a nano world. You can watch the full 79 minute talk above.

Final­ly, since we’re talk­ing about things nano, let me leave you with this — Stephen Fry’s 2010 primer on nanoscience. Pro­duced in part­ner­ship with Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, NANO YOU was named the best short film at the Scin­e­ma Sci­ence Film Fes­ti­val and it does a pret­ty good job of explain­ing the nano world in 17 short min­utes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Richard Feynman’s Physics Course from Cor­nell (1964)

Richard Feynman’s Ode to a Flower: A Short Ani­ma­tion

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Learn How Richard Feynman Cracked the Safes with Atomic Secrets at Los Alamos

in Math, Physics, Technology | April 17th, 2013

The sto­ry has become part of physics lore: A young Richard Feyn­man, future Nobel win­ner, was bored with life in the remote New Mex­i­co desert while work­ing on the atom­ic bomb dur­ing World War II, so he amused him­self by learn­ing to pick the com­bi­na­tion locks in the sup­pos­ed­ly secure fil­ing cab­i­nets con­tain­ing Amer­i­ca’s nuclear secrets. As Feyn­man would lat­er write in his essay, “Safe­crack­er Meets Safe­crack­er”:

To demon­strate that the locks meant noth­ing, when­ev­er I want­ed some­body’s report and they weren’t around, I’d just go in their office, open the fil­ing cab­i­net, and take it out. When I was fin­ished I would give it back to the guy: “Thanks for your report.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Out of your fil­ing cab­i­net.”

“But I locked it!”

“I know you locked it. The locks are no good.”

So the offi­cials at Los Alam­os installed cab­i­nets with bet­ter locks. But Feyn­man stud­ied the new ones sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, and even­tu­al­ly, giv­en a lit­tle time, he could open any lock at will. As a joke, he left a note in one cab­i­net that said, “I bor­rowed doc­u­ment no. LA4312–Feynman the safe­crack­er.”

I opened the safes which con­tained all the secrets to the atom­ic bomb: the sched­ules for the pro­duc­tion of the plu­to­ni­um, the purifi­ca­tion pro­ce­dures, how much mate­r­i­al is need­ed, how the bomb works, how the neu­trons are gen­er­at­ed, what the design is, the dimensions–the entire infor­ma­tion that was known at Los Alam­os: the whole schmeer!

To learn a bit about how Feyn­man did it, watch this fas­ci­nat­ing lit­tle video by jour­nal­ist Brady Haran of the YouTube-fund­ed Num­ber­phile. Haran inter­views Roger Bow­ley, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham, who explains sev­er­al of the inge­nious meth­ods used by Feyn­man to solve the prob­lem of crack­ing a lock with (sup­pos­ed­ly) a mil­lion pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions. And to learn more about Feyn­man’s adven­ture as a safe­crack­er, be sure to read “Safe­crack­er Meets Safe­crack­er,” which is includ­ed in his book Sure­ly You’re Jok­ing, Mr. Feyn­man! and can be read on PDF by click­ing here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Richard Feynman’s Physics Course from Cor­nell (1964)

Richard Feynman’s Ode to a Flower: A Short Ani­ma­tion

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Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and Songwriting, Animated

in Math, Music, Physics | April 12th, 2013

I went through child­hood lis­ten­ing to Tom Lehrer’s “New Math”. The 1965 song, per­formed in part like stan­dard spo­ken-word com­e­dy, made me laugh every time. “In the new approach,” the satirist says of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary math­e­mat­ics he pur­ports to teach us, “the impor­tant thing is to under­stand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer.” Work­ing aloud through a sub­trac­tion prob­lem at the piano, Lehrer sings the oper­a­tions: “And so you’ve got thir­teen tens and you take away sev­en and that leaves five. Well, six, actu­al­ly, but the idea’s the impor­tant thing.” This struck me at the time as noth­ing more than an amus­ing­ly goofy numer­ic riff, and per­haps one with harsh impli­ca­tions for the flaky edu­ca­tion­al fads of the nineties my peers and I then endured. Only years lat­er did I find out that Cold War Amer­i­ca of the ear­ly six­ties actu­al­ly went through a New Math phase, shak­en hard enough by Sput­nik to des­per­ate­ly foist abstract, set the­o­ry-dri­ven math text­books upon its ele­men­tary school­ers.

Lehrer, who turned 85 on Tues­day, knows the sub­ject well: he holds degrees in math­e­mat­ics from Har­vard, has co-authored such papers as “Ran­dom walks with restrain­ing bar­ri­er as applied to the biased bina­ry counter” and “The dis­tri­b­u­tion of the num­ber of local­ly max­i­mal ele­ments in a ran­dom sam­ple”, and, after retir­ing from music in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, taught math class­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz. Leg­end has it that he would incor­po­rate rel­e­vant songs from his cat­a­log into lec­tures. But he nev­er sang only about math­e­mat­ics; he also sang about physics, as you can see in the ani­mat­ed ver­sion of his 1959 song “The Ele­ments” above, a trib­ute simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to the peri­od­ic table and The Pirates of Pen­zance. Nobody can deny the impor­tance of learn­ing how to sub­tract or how to tell one ele­ment from anoth­er, but we’d do well to keep Lehrer’s sharp human insights, present implic­it­ly in all his music and explic­it­ly in some of it, in mind. So put one of his records on the next time you have a birth­day of your own, tak­ing a brac­ing shot of his wit before you con­tin­ue, as he put it in “Bright Col­lege Days”, “slid­ing down the razor blade of life.”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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If Astronauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | April 11th, 2013

The astro­nauts aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion work every day on all kinds of exper­i­ments, from work­ing with robots to prepar­ing for space­walks. But when they get a break, they often field ques­tions from school chil­dren and adults about life in space.

Com­man­der Chris Had­field recent­ly video­taped him­self demon­strat­ing a sim­ple exper­i­ment inspired by a com­mon ques­tion: If an astro­naut cries in space, do their tears fall?

On Earth, of course, it’s grav­i­ty that caus­es tears to roll down the cheek. In a micro­grav­i­ty envi­ron­ment, if an astro­naut is sad or gets some­thing in his/her eye, tears will cer­tain­ly well up, but there will be none of what Smokey Robinson’s tears made on his face.

Had­field, pos­si­bly the most social media-savvy astro­naut ever with more than 500,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers, game­ly demon­strates that tears do pool under the eye but they make no tracks. Squirt­ing water into his right eye, he rolls his head around, caus­ing the pud­dle of “tears” to shift back and forth and even roll over the bridge of his nose.

Tears don’t fall, he con­cludes, so bring a han­ky.

Had­field is no stranger to demon­strat­ing, or dis­cussing, human bod­i­ly func­tions in space. Speak­ing before the Ontario Space Cen­tre a few years ago, he dis­cussed some­thing that you may have won­dered about: going to the bath­room in space.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site: .

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Albert Einstein on Individual Liberty, Without Which There Would Be ‘No Shakespeare, No Goethe, No Newton’

in History, Physics | April 2nd, 2013

We recent­ly post­ed a rare audio record­ing of Albert Ein­stein read­ing his essay, “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence.” Today we have a sim­i­lar­ly rare treat: filmed excerpts from a speech on indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty that Ein­stein gave short­ly after the Nazis rose to pow­er and he became a refugee from his native Ger­many. With­out free­dom for the indi­vid­ual, Ein­stein said, “life to a self-respect­ing man is not worth liv­ing.”

Ein­stein deliv­ered the speech on Octo­ber 3, 1933 at the Roy­al Albert Hall in Lon­don. As it turned out, the speech was some­thing of a farewell address to his native con­ti­nent. Four days lat­er Ein­stein board­ed a ship to Amer­i­ca and nev­er returned to Europe. The speech was orga­nized by the Aca­d­e­m­ic Assis­tance Coun­cil (now the Coun­cil for Assist­ing Refugee Aca­d­e­mics) and oth­er aid groups to help the hun­dreds of Ger­man intel­lec­tu­als, many of them Jews, who were fired from their uni­ver­si­ty jobs by the Nazis.

Although the Albert Hall now has a max­i­mum allowed capac­i­ty of 5,544, accord­ing to his­tor­i­cal accounts more than 10,000 peo­ple crowd­ed into the old hall to hear Ein­stein, who warned of a com­ing cat­a­stro­phe in Europe that would rival the Great War. “Today,” he said, “the ques­tions which con­cern us are: How can we save mankind and its spir­i­tu­al acqui­si­tions of which we are the heirs? How can we save Europe from a new dis­as­ter?” Ein­stein remind­ed the audi­ence to keep clear­ly in mind what is ulti­mate­ly at stake: indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty. The speech was lat­er pub­lished in a dif­fer­ent form in Ein­stein’s book, Out of My Lat­er Years, and you can open a PDF tran­script of the orig­i­nal by click­ing here. The film clip is cut into four short excerpts. In heav­i­ly accent­ed Eng­lish, Ein­stein says:

I am glad that you have me giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty of express­ing to you here my deep sense of grat­i­tude as a man, as a good Euro­pean, and as a Jew.

It can­not be my task today to act as a judge of the con­duct of a nation which for many years has con­sid­ered me as her own.

We are con­cerned not mere­ly with the tech­ni­cal prob­lem of secur­ing and main­tain­ing peace, but also with the impor­tant task of edu­ca­tion and enlight­en­ment.

With­out such free­dom there would have been no Shake­speare, no Goethe, no New­ton, no Fara­day, no Pas­teur, and no Lis­ter.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

Ein­stein Explains His Famous For­mu­la, E=mc², in Orig­i­nal Audio

Albert Ein­stein Archive Now Online, Bring­ing 80,000+ Doc­u­ments to the Web

Find Cours­es on Ein­stein in the Physics Sec­tion of our Free Online Cours­es Col­lec­tion

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Staggering Genius of Isaac Newton

in Physics | March 29th, 2013

Genius — these days, we bandy the term about ever so freely. Every­one’s a genius, includ­ing this 2‑year-old wield­ing a pair of nail clip­pers. Then, Neil deGrasse Tyson comes along and reminds us what a genius real­ly looks like. Asked “Who is the Great­est Physi­cist in His­to­ry,” he responds, Isaac New­ton, with­out any hes­i­ta­tion. New­ton dis­cov­ered the laws of optics, prov­ing that white light is actu­al­ly made up of col­ors, the col­ors of the rain­bow. He mapped out his three laws of motion and the uni­ver­sal laws of grav­i­ta­tion. And then he invent­ed dif­fer­en­tial and inte­gral cal­cu­lus to explain why plan­ets orbit in an ellip­ti­cal fash­ion. Now get ready for the kick­er. This all hap­pened before New­town turned 26. That, my friends, is what genius looks like.

This clip comes from an extend­ed Big Think inter­view, which you can watch in full here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Anno­tat­ed Prin­cip­ia Go Dig­i­tal

Neil deGrasse Tyson Deliv­ers the Great­est Sci­ence Ser­mon Ever

Free Physics Cours­es (From Our Col­lec­tion of 700 Free Online Cours­es)

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The Physics Professor, the Glamour Model, and a Whole Suitcase Full of Trouble

in Physics, Random | March 9th, 2013

framptondrawingFrom the annals of Why Smart Peo­ple Do Dumb Things: The New York Times has a long piece on Paul Framp­ton, a the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na-Chapel Hill, who meets a Czech mod­el online, then, rather gullibly, trav­els to South Amer­i­ca to get to know her in per­son. Instead of find­ing love in La Paz, Framp­ton winds up in a dilap­i­dat­ed Buenos Aires prison. It’s a bizarre tale, a sto­ry of hubris, naivete, lust, and decep­tion all rolled into one. Grab a cof­fee, set aside some time, and have a read.

Find us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and we’ll deliv­er our posts right to your vir­tu­al doorstep. Or sign up for our Dai­ly Email!

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Physical Attraction: Marriage Proposal Comes in the Form of a Physics Paper

in Life, Physics | February 26th, 2013

physics marriage proposal

On red­dit, a user wrote yes­ter­day, “My boyfriend of 7 years and I are both physi­cists. Here’s how he pro­posed to me.” Yes, the mar­riage pro­pos­al is a physics paper of sorts, called “Two Body Inter­ac­tions: A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study,” that con­cludes:

The sum­ma­ry of the find­ings of the study are pre­sent­ed in Fig­ure 1 and that that the project hap­pi­ness is upward with high con­fi­dence. Tak­ing these results into account, the author pro­pos­es to Christie the indef­i­nite con­tin­u­a­tion of the study. The sub­jects response to their pro­pos­al should be indi­cat­ed below [by check­ing the “Yes” or “No” box].

Bren­dan McMoni­gal and Christie Nelan (pic­tured here) met at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney sev­en years ago. They will tie the knot this com­ing May, and we hope you’ll wish them the best.…

via Boing­Bo­ing and @stevesilberman

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