Richard Phillips Feynman and nanotechnology concept

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11th 1918-Frebruary 15, 1988) was born in New York. He was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of super cooled helium.  

He grew up in Far Rockaway, where even as a youngster he established a reputation for his unbridled curiosity his sense or humor and a talent for mathematics. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1942.

In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.

His dinner talk on December 29th, 1959 for the American Physical Society meeting at Caltech seems to have started it all, or at least made the idea tangible.

His famous lecture was entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and postulated the idea of nanotechnology.

Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms and controlling things on a staggeringly small scale.  In nanotechnology, ‘small scale’ means at or around the scale of a nanometer, where one nanometer is a billionth of a meter or about 1/80,000 the width of a human hair.

It was not until November 1979 – 20 years after Feynman’s talk – that ‘Plenty of Room’ was respected as a blueprint for what later called nanotechnology.

The Foresight nanotech Institute created two prizes named after Richard Phillips Feynman, acknowledging his role in launching the field of nanotechnology.
Richard Phillips Feynman and nanotechnology concept

History of Quantum Mechanics

History of Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics is the study of mechanical systems whose dimensions are close to the atomic scale, such as molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and other subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics is a most intriguing theory, the empirical success of which is as great as its departure from the basic intuitions of previous theories.

It is a fundamental branch of physics with wide applications. The foundations of quantum mechanics were established during the first half of the twentieth century by Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli and others.

The history of quantum mechanics began essentially with the 1838 discovery of cathode rays by Michael Faraday, the 1859 statement of the black body radiation problem by Gustav Kirchhoff, the 1877 suggestion by Ludwig Boltzmann that the energy states of a physical system could be discrete, and the 1900 quantum hypothesis by Max Planck that any energy is radiated and absorbed in quantities.

According to the theorem proved by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1859 on the basis of the second principle of thermodynamics, the blackbody spectrum has a very remarkable property: It is a universal function of temperature only. In the 1877, Ludwig Boltzmann and Willy Wien restricted the form of this function by combining electromagnetism and thermodynamics. In the 1890s, spectroscopists working at Berlin measured it with the aim of determining an absolute standard for high temperature measurement. At the same time, the Berlin theorist Max Planck attempted a complete theoretical determination of the blackbody spectrum.

In 1905, Einstein computed the entropy of dilute thermal radiation from the high frequency limit of Planck’s law.

In 1913, Niels Bohr emphasized that mathematical symbols from classical mechanics permitted visualization of the atom as a minuscule Copernican system. Although suitably quantized laws of classical mechanics are used to calculate the electron’s allowed orbits, or stationary states, classical mechanics can neither depict nor describe the electron in transit.

In 1932 von Neumann put quantum theory on a firm theoretical basis. Some of the earlier work had lacked mathematical rigour, but von Neumann put the whole theory into the setting of operator algebra.

In 1933 Fermi develops a successful quantum field theory of beta decay. It describes how neutrons spontaneously change into protons and emit electrons and neutrinos.
History of Quantum Mechanics