Miracle materials that would supercharge clean energy are on the cards now we can play with individual atoms. We just need to work out how to arrange them
By James Mitchell Crow
“WHY cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?” When the fabled physicist Richard Feynman posed the question during a famous speech in December 1959, he was not looking for an easy-to-carry version of the illustrated reference guide. He was drawing attention to the problem of manipulating things on a vanishingly small scale.
As he warmed to his theme, Feynman dared to imagine that we might one day build with the building blocks from which all the known matter in the universe is made. “I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately – in the great future – we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!”
In this vision of atomic Legoland, we could build all manner of wonder stuff. We could make silicon’s successor, a material that would allow us to keep stuffing ever more computing power into tiny devices. We could come up with a substance that would beef up our puny solar cells or supercharge the ultimate battery, so we could store all that clean energy. We might even trigger chemical reactions that are impossible today.
The trouble with that vision is that atoms are ridiculously minuscule, so much so that more than a million iron atoms would fit on to the head of a steel pin. And yet, in the bowels of giant brushed-steel contraptions that bring to mind steampunk machines, we have begun to nudge.