No one saw it conning. Not the aca-demician working on edge-of-technology research or the far-seeing predictors of dizzyingly alternate futures, such as Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke. Future science historians will likely flag 1959 as the year when our universe changed. This was when Richard Feynman gave his "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" talk at Caltech, during which he stated, "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom." In his usual quiet way, Feynman had foreseen the coming of molecular engineering, aka nanotechnology.
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