Bridging Size Scales with Self-Assembling Supramolecular Materials

Abstract

The notion of micromachines made up of miniature gears and motors may seem like a fairy tale. In 1959, Richard Feynman delivered a lecture entitled “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” a bold prediction of what was to come in the future, where one could fit the entireEncyclopaedia Britannicaonto the head of a pin or use ions focused through a microscope lens in reverse to etch away silica to create patterns on a submicron scale. In retrospect, Feynman's hypotheses were amazingly accurate. He was describing the techniques of microlithography and the manipulation of atoms by scanning tunneling electron microscopy, methods that are commonplace today. Advances in biochemistry have revealed the enormous complexity of “simple” organisms, leading one to conclude that “micromachines” (of a complexity that a visionary giant such as Feynman had foreseen) have long been operating quite happily without any assistance from chemists!