There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

I found Richard P. Feynman’s talk at California Institute of Technology in 1959 to be very interesting and an eerie prophesy when read in 2015. He makes many points about creating information and machines that are smaller, and there is much that he speculated about that is seen today in one form or another.

In particular, I found his point about information becoming smaller to be interesting. His vision of books being pressed into very tiny surfaces and being viewed with microscopes seems almost silly when we look at how information is stored today.

The first commercially available hard drive to measure its storage capacity in gigabytes was the IBM 3380, first released in 1980. Its capacity, which at the time was groundbreaking, was a measly 2.5 GB. Today, hard drives are an essential mode of storage, with personal hard drives often holding one or two terabytes of data.

And as far as modern equivalents go, today’s 8 GB flash drives, which are some of the smaller drives currently available, are small enough to fit on our key chains, and weigh less than two ounces. The IBM 3380 was anything but travel size, and weighed over 500 pounds. So while we do not use Feynman’s ideas of imprinting books on the heads of pins as a practical storage system, he was correct in speculating that the future was going to revolve around mankind’s information taking up less space.

I also found his comment about Albert R. Hibbs’ ideas about robots and cameras in surgery to be interesting. He referred to it as “a very wild idea”, but in 2015, it is far from that. Laparoscopic surgery is commonly used today. It involves using multiple small incisions to accomplish a surgery with small tools and cameras, without the need to large incisions for hands and traditional tools. While we do not have robotic surgeons moving through our bloodstream, we have robotic surgery options, such as the da Vinci Surgical System. This system uses robotics to accomplish surgeries that are minimally invasive, and these types of surgeries are nearly impossible to imagine in 1959.

The ideas that Feynman brought up during his talk may have seemed far-fetched at the time, but many of his ideas are considered a standard part of modern life.


Works Cited

"The Da Vinci® Surgical System." Da Vinci Surgery. Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Apr. 2013. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. 
Kovar, Joseph F. "The History Of The Hard Drive And Its Future." CRN. CRN, 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.  
Lexar. "Lexar JumpDrive TwistTurn 64GB USB Flash Drive LJDTT64GASBNA (Black)." Amazon.com: : Electronics. Amazon, n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.
"Robot-assisted Laparoscopic Surgery Using the Da Vinci System." Robot Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery the Da Vinci System. USC Center for Pancreatic and Biliary Diseases, n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. 
"WHAT IS LAPAROSCOPIC SURGERY." What Is Laparoscopic Surgery? USC Center for Pancreatic and Biliary Diseases, n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.