Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford University in 1985, was one of the two people to meet one of a pair of challenges put forth by Nobel Prize-winning physicist

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfl ...

at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in 1959, in a talk titled "

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibi ...

".Gribbin, John. ''Richard Feynman: A Life in Science'', Dutton, 1997, p. 170. In December of that year, Feynman offered two challenges at the meeting, held that year in

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

, offering a $1000 prize to the first person to solve each of them. Both challenges involved nanotechnology, and the first prize was won by William McLellan. The second challenge was for anyone who could find a way to inscribe a book page on a surface area 25,000 times smaller than its standard print (a scale at which the entire contents of the

Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...

could fit on the head of a pin). Newman claimed the prize when he wrote the first page of Charles Dickens' ''

A Tale of Two Cities ''A Tale of Two Cities'' is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in ...

'', at the required scale, on the head of a pin with a beam of

electrons The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no ...

. The main problem he had before he could claim the prize was finding the text after he had written it; the head of the pin was a huge empty space compared with the text inscribed on it.

References

External links

APS article
— a further account of the prize-winning feat
Caltech article
{{DEFAULTSORT:Newman, Tom Nanotechnologists Living people Year of birth missing (living people)