Atoms and the voids
Individual atoms offer ultra-dense information storage
WHAT if “we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down”? So asked the physicist Richard Feynman in an influential 1959 lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. This manipulation would mean that information, like text, could be written using atoms themselves. Feynman predicted that the entire “Encyclopædia Britannica” could be written on the head of a pin.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Atoms and the voids”
From the July 23rd 2016 edition
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