The World in 2030

The World in 2030 83
This area of research was first identified by the legendary
physicist Professor Richard P. Feynman 163 in his seminal 1959
lecture entitled ‘There’s Plenty Of Room At the Bottom’ 164 in
which he proposed that much could be achieved by scientists
who chose to work at the atomic level. But the field of
nanotechnology only began to develop properly in the mid-
1980s when a graduate PhD student called Eric Drexler 165 wrote
a thesis which went on to become a highly influential book
called ‘Nanosystems Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and
Computation’. 166 Serious scientific research began at that point.
Simple nanotechnology is already being used today
with nano-scale additives being used to make plastics. As
Technology Research News reported in 2003:
Researchers from the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands and the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst have found ways to use electricity to coax
microscopic amounts of plastic to form patterns containing
columns and tubes.
The microscopic plastic features are as small as 100
nanometers, which is 50 times smaller than a red
blood cell, and could be used to make electronic and
mechanical devices at that scale. ‘The structures can
be fairly complicated and we have a wide range of
different patterns,’ said Ullrich Steiner, a professor of
polymer physics at the University of Groningen.
The method could be used for plastic electronics,
light-emitting diodes, solar energy devices, and optical
filters, according to Steiner. 167