(527a) Big Advantages of Thinking Small

It is now well past a half century since Richard Feynman presented his often-cited seminar bearing the provocative title, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” Feynman’s observation about the great engineering opportunity of the small scale was made several years before the invention of that great enabler, the integrated circuit, and more than a decade in advance of the first microelectromechanical systems. Both ICs and MEMS proved that indeed there is valuable room at the bottom, room for engineering systems that have provided legs for the profound upheaval of society itself through the internet, wireless communications, and related ground-breaking cousins. Today the design frontier is described in nano-scale units-- giving rise to application horizons that are expanding at ever-increasing rates. A major challenge for engineers today is to bring ‘up from the bottom’ the newly developed capabilities and to apply them in the solution of human-scale problems.