How far can we push computing?

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued, or from storing every book ever written in something the size of a dust speck—or, ultimately, from arranging matter atom by atom. Biology already did versions of this (a living cell keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA), so all of this was plainly permitted by the laws of physics. We simply had not built the tools yet.

In other words, there was plenty …