Nanotechnology Symposium at March Meeting

Following in the wake of President Clinton's "major new National Nanotechnology Initiative" announced in his remarks at Caltech on January 21, the APS will present a special symposium at the March meeting to acquaint the physics community with the details of the initiative, and to review some of the legislative and budgetary hurdles it must still overcome.

One of the participants in the symposium will be Evelyn L. Hu, director of QUEST (the NSF Science and Technology Center for Quantized Electronic Structures) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who pointed out that Richard Feynman foreshadowed the Nanotechnology Initiative in 1959 when he spoke about 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom'. According to Hu, President Clinton's request for a national investment in Nanotechnology underscores the importance of this area of research, the breadth of expertise it will draw from, and the range of applications which it will benefit. Other participants in the symposium will be Patricia M. Dehmer, Associate Director for Basic Energy Sciences at DOE; Thomas A. Weber, Director of the Materials Research Division of the NSF; and Robert C. Dynes, Chancellor of the University of California at San Diego. The symposium will be chaired by James Langer, President of the APS.

The symposium will take place Wednesday, March 22, between 5:30 and 7 pm.