t is an unwritten rule on Nature Nanotechnology that Richard Feynman's famous 1959 lecture 'There's plenty of room at the bottom' should not be referred to at the start of articles unless absolutely necessary. It is not that we have anything against Feynman or this lecture — quite the opposite. Rather, our unwritten rule is intended to encourage variety in the introductions of articles, which is why we also discourage references to Moore's law in opening sentences. However, we are making an exception for this issue because it contains a number of articles1 that mark the 50th anniversary of Feynman's lecture, which he delivered to a meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology on 29 December 1959