7:30 pm, Thursday, September 11th, 2008
Fairmont Social Lounge, St. John's College
The Small Frontier
Don Eigler
IBM Fellow
IBM Almaden Research Center
We live in a time of extraordinary scientific, medical and technological progress. When we take a close look at what makes this rapid progress possible we find a common enabling theme: mankind's ability to build ever smaller structures. How far can this era of miniaturization take us and what will be the consequences? We will begin to form partial answers to this question by examining the ultimate limit of miniaturization: building things atom-by-atom from the bottom up. We will see how this is done and explore its utility in allowing us to learn about the nanometer-scale world... the Small Frontier.
We live in a time of extraordinary scientific, medical and technological progress. When we take a close look at what makes this rapid progress possible we find a common enabling theme: mankind's ability to build ever smaller structures. How far can this era of miniaturization take us and what will be the consequences? We will begin to form partial answers to this question by examining the ultimate limit of miniaturization: building things atom-by-atom from the bottom up. We will see how this is done and explore its utility in allowing us to learn about the nanometer-scale world... the Small Frontier.
