Polymers Find Plenty of Wiggle Room at the Bottom

摘要

In his 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," Richard Feynman discussed the prospects of developing future nanoscale technologies (1). There, he stated that the homogeneous properties of amorphous plastics and glasses would render them the materials of choice for such applications. Today, polymeric materials-particularly glassy, noncrystal-line polymers-do play a key role in the manufacturing sector, but these tend to be bulk materials. Realizing Feynman's vision of nanoma-chines based on polymers would require an understanding of the properties of polymeric materials as they are shrunk to comprise a few or even single polymer chains.