Micro thermal engines: is there any room at the bottom?

摘要

Richard P.Feynman introduced the field of microscale and nanoscale engineering in 1959 by giving a talk on how to make things very small. Feynman's premise was that no fundamental physical laws limit the size of a machine down to the microscopic level. Is this true for all types of machines? Are micro thermal devices fundamen tally different than mechanically-based machines with respect to their scaling laws?