How far can we push computing?

How far can we push computing? Nowadays big advances are made by scaling up--think more chips packed into ever-bigger data centers. But as we near the ceiling of what we can build, there's still plenty of room below, at the fundamental physical limits of computing. Richard Feynman speaks at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1965. 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 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.