Plenty of Room in the Middle: Nanoscience - The Next 50 Years

Subscribe to the KNI Email List

Plenty of Room in the Middle: Nanoscience - The Next 50 Years

January 15, 2011

California Institute of Technology

View Flyer (pdf)

Just over fifty years ago, on December 29, 1959, future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gave a visionary and, now, famous talk entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Although he didn’t intend it, Feynman's 7,000 words marked a defining moment in what would become the field of nanotechnology—long before anything "nano" appeared on the horizon. In celebration of Feynman’s prescient vision, we are convening a Kavli Futures Symposium to view the present state-of-the-art in nanoscience, and envision the next 50 years to come. This visionary scientific workshop will follow the public event TEDxCaltech, "Feynman's Vision: The Next 50 Years," to be held at Caltech on Friday, 14 January 2011. The TEDx event will feature short, publicly accessible talks spanning multiple fields, one of which will be nanoscience. The Kavli Futures Symposium, to follow the next day, will delve much deeper into the future possibilities of nanoscience. Our event title, "Plenty of Room in the Middle: Nanoscience - The Next 50 Years", reflects both its connection with the theme of the TEDxCaltech event, and what we perceive as vast future opportunities in scaling up from atomic assembly and individual nanodevices, to macroscopic systems and structures with emergent properties and functionality.

The venue, Caltech's Hameetman Auditorium, is a location that will engender an intimate connection between speakers, provocateurs, and symposium participants. The entire day will be participatory and interactive; the provoateurs will "seed" —and moderate—questions during the presentations. An extended discussion session will conclude each of the four sessions, and follow on the themes presented by its four speakers. The event website will provide podcasts of the day, and will host a forum for ongoing visionary discussion. Registration, limited to 150, is on a first-come / first-served basis (until filled).

View info in pdf format: