George M. Whitesides 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.

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.

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

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

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If we are ever to cross the 100-nano barrier in electronics, we need to develop nano structures that let electrons move through, as they do through wires and semiconductors. And these structures must survive in the real world of air, water, boiling temperatures.

One of the concepts essential to molecular manufacturing is that of a self-replicating manufacturing system. That concept has lagged behind in its acceptance.

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.

Graphene is dead; long live graphene.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

Life is nanotechnology that works.

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

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.

Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA's push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we're carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones.

There's plenty of room at the bottom.

I was inspired by many teachers when I started my channel, Bob Ross being one of them. His voice was so soothing, almost like hypnosis. He was that great of a teacher, even the casual viewer could learn how to paint from watching his show. Growing up, I just remember him being so mesmerizing on screen.

In rural North Carolina, you can get lots of great advice about how to clean and quarter a deer carcass, but we didn't really have anyone to ask for video advice, so we just kept learning through trial and error.

My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.

Your happiness is at the intersection of your passions and learning from great people.