From the Editor in Chief: Plenty of Room at the Bottom

of his time in imagining what small might mean. In the late ’50s, while people imagined motors being reduced to the size of a fingernail, he foresaw a world by 2000 in which we could etch information onto materials at atomic scales. He calculated that ultimately, all the information then available in all the world’s libraries would fit in material one two-hundredths of an inch wide. In several of these columns, I’ve tried to convey a sense of wonder for the orders of magnitude, large or small, that the area of intelligent systems now encompasses. This is difficult because such quantities are beyond our grasp. Our perceptions aren’t tuned to the very large or the very small; we struggle to appreciate figures on a cosmic or nano scale.