Paul McEuen Quotes

Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties.

During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.

The difference between a gas and a liquid is that in the former, the atoms and molecules move to and fro in an independent existence, whereas in the latter, they are always in touch with one another, though they are changing partners continually.

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.

The infinite variety in the properties of the solid materials we find in the world is really the expression of the infinite variety of the ways in which the atoms and molecules can be tied together, and of the strength of those ties.

The well-known fact that the form of a specific substance, e.g. water, and hence its properties can alter without a change in composition was disposed of by the formal view that a physical, not a chemical, process was involved.

A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.

The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.

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.

Graphene is dead; long live graphene.

In the process of making nanomaterials, we learned that with the electronic density of states, the phonon electronic properties and everything change at the nano-level. So the thermoelectric properties would also be changed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I swim like a fish and I have an amazing kick.

The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer. You'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man.

On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.

It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.

Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?

What is important about graphene is the new physics it has delivered.

The concept of graphene came along in 1947, but nobody paid much attention to it. I was fascinated because it had a linear E versus K while everything else that people were working on at that time had a quadratic dispersion relationship. I wondered why this was and what was so special about it. That was my fascination.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.