- Tom Newman (scientist)
Tom Newman, a graduate student at
Stanford University in 1985, was one of the two people to solve one of a pair of challenges put forth by Nobel Prize-winning physicistRichard Feynman at the annual meeting of theAmerican Physical Society in 1959, in a talk titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom ".Gribbin, John. "Richard Feynman: A Life in Science" Dutton 1997, pg 170.]In December of that year, Feynman offered two challenges at the meeting, held that year in
Caltech , offering a $1000 prize to the first person to solve each of them. Both challenges involvednanotechnology , and the first prize was won by William McLellan.The second challenge was for anyone who could find a way to inscribe a book page on a surface area 25,000 times smaller than its standard print (a scale at which the entire contents of the
Encyclopedia Britannica could fit on the head of a pin).Newman claimed the prize when he wrote the first page of Charles Dickens' "
A Tale of Two Cities ", at the required scale, on the head of a pin with a beam ofelectrons . The main problem he had before he could claim the prize was finding the text after he had written it; the head of the pin was a huge empty space compared with the text inscribed on it.References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.