Richard Feynman Chooses Chemistry

[NanoMachine]

I saw today that the physicist who many physicists (and other scientists) worship, Richard Feynman, was actually a big fan of chemistry. He wrote:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms-little particles that that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

This is what chemistry's all about.

[Paul Robbins]

He said that in the first chapter of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which I have.

In Chapter 3 he says:

The interaction between the two sciences (chemistry and physics) was very great because the theory of atoms was substantiated to a large extent by experiments in chemistry.......

All these rules were ultimately explained in principle by quantum mechanics, so that theoretical chemistry is in fact physics.

What I find interesting is that a large part of the future of science and technology lies on the nano scale (he said, speaking to someone called NanoMachine!) and this is the scale chemistry has always dealt with. It's just now we're getting techniques which enable us to deal with atoms and molecules with greater precision than ever before.

And of course Feynman is also known as the father of nanotechnology.