Digital memory is getting smaller and smaller (Image: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty)

Editorial: Writ small, huge recall

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the idea that you might store your entire music collection on a single hand-held device would have been greeted with disbelief. Ditto backing up all your essential computer files using a memory stick key ring, or storing thousands of high-resolution holiday snaps in one pocket-sized camera.

What a difference a decade makes. The impossible has become possible thanks to the lightning rise of a memory technology with the snazzy name of “flash”.

So where is the technology that can store our high-definition home cinema collection on a single chip? Or every book we would ever want to read or refer to? Flash can’t do that. In labs across the world, though, an impressive array of technologies is lining up that could make such dreams achievable.

These “supermemories” are close to realising a vision set out by revered physicist Richard Feynman 50 years ago this month. In a lecture to the American Physical Society entitled “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”, he asked whether it might ever be possible to write all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a pin head. Each tiny ink dot used to print each letter would have to be reduced to the size of just 1000 atoms, he calculated – a square with sides of just 9 nanometres.

Feynman speculated that people looking back from the year 2000 would wonder why it took till 1960 before we began to explore this “room at the bottom” – what we now know as …