George M. Whitesides Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

Semiconductor research and the Nobel Prize in physics seem to be contradictory since one may come to the conclusion that such a complicated system like a semiconductor is not useful for very fundamental discoveries.

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.

With electronics, they just get smaller and smaller.

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.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

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

My learning process has always been very idea-oriented. I never sat down with a book being like, 'OK, now I'm going to learn about transistors.' Instead I had an idea that I really liked and learned as I was trying to figure out how to build it.

Electronics was something I could always fall back on when I needed food on the table.

My new iPhone, I'm obsessed. My iPod. I love all the Mac crap. AppleTV, I'm crazy about that. I'd rather buy a new gadget than, like, a purse.

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.

I'm fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

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

Essentially, every technology you have ever heard of, where electrons move from here to there, has the potential to be revolutionized by the availability of molecular wires made up of carbon. Organic chemists will start building devices. Molecular electronics could become reality.

I still love the semiconductor industry.

It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it.

So I, I knew something in a business sense about semiconductors and I appreciated their possibilities.

Back in the '40s and early '50s, building simple electronic projects was a popular hobby of many people. Back then, you could buy, you know, a few parts and - with tubes and build something on your kitchen table, and it would actually work.