Richard Smalley Quotes

Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn't believe.

Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.

Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.

When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.

It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.

Graphene is dead; long live graphene.

Nanoengineering is learning how to make devices as small as 10 to 100 atoms in width. Much of the work is going on in the electronics industry, where there is great demand to pack more components onto computer chips.

One of the issues in electronics is that we work only in two scales - transistors and collections of transistors - and that's the device. But to take full advantage of nano, we're going to have to think about that full hierarchy of levels of structure.

The holy grail would be to turn a knob, and out comes the nanotube of the right diameter and chirality.

All the action, in semiconductors at the present time is in the new consumer applications, and that's where we have focused our activities since we started doing our own products in the late '90s.

Administrators and scientists are excited by buckyballs for their own sake, and if they turn out to have practical applications, so much the better.

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.

People - especially the geeks who created it - have tended to look at the Internet as something that's hermetically sealed: there's the Internet and the rest of the world. But that's not how people want to use the Internet. They want to use it as a way of better navigating the real world.

Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.

A molecular manufacturing technology will let us build molecular surgical tools, and those tools will, for the first time, let us directly address the problems at the very root level.

On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.

With electronics, they just get smaller and smaller.

After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.

The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

When I understood the rudiments of what nanotech was all about, I knew I wanted to participate.

And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one.

Nanotechnology is manufacturing with atoms.

Once we understand how molecules are formed, we can manipulate them. If you can manipulate molecules, you can manipulate genes and matter, you can synthesize new material - the implications are just unbelievable.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.