The next step in nanotechnology

Let's imagine a sculptor
building a statue,

just chipping away with his chisel.

Michelangelo had this elegant way
of describing it when he said,

"Every block of stone
has a statue inside of it,

and it's the task
of the sculptor to discover it."

But what if he worked
in the opposite direction?

Not from a solid block of stone,

but from a pile of dust,

somehow gluing millions of these particles
together to form a statue.

I know that's an absurd notion --

It's probably impossible.

The only way you get a statue from a pile
of dust is if the statue built itself --

if somehow we could compel millions
of these particles to come together

to form the statue.

Now, as odd as that sounds,

that is almost exactly the problem
I work on in my lab.

I don't build with stone,

I build with nanomaterials.

They're these just impossibly small,
fascinating little object.

They're so small that if this controller
was a nanoparticle,

a human hair would be the size
of this entire room.

And they're at the heart of a field
we call nanotechnology,

which I'm sure we've all heard about,

and we've all heard about how
it is going to change everything.

You know, when I was a graduate student,

it was one of the most exciting
times to be working in nanotechnology.

There were scientific breakthroughs
happening all the time.

The conferences were buzzing,

there was tons of money
pouring in from funding agencies.

And the reason is,

when objects get really small,

they're governed by a different set
of physics that govern ordinary objects,

like the ones we interact with.

We call this physics quantum mechanics.

And what is tells you is that you
can precisely tune their behavior

just by making seemingly
small changes to them,

like adding or removing
a handful of atoms,

or twisting the material.

It's like this ultimate toolkit.

You really felt empowered;

you felt like you could make anything.

And we were doing it,

and by we I mean my whole
generation of graduate students.

We were trying to make blazing-fast
computers using nanomaterials.

We were constructing quantum dots

that could one day go in your body
and find and fight disease.

There were even groups
trying to make and elevator to space

using carbon nanotubes.

You can look that up,

it's true.

Anyways, we thought it was
going to effect all parts

of science and technology,

from computing to medicine.

And I have to admit,

I drank all of the Kool-Aid.

I mean, every last drop.

But that was 15 years ago,

and --

so fantastic science was done,

really important work.

We've learned a lot.

We were never able to translate
that science into new technologies --

into technologies that could
actually impact people.

And the reason is,

these nanomaterials --

they're like a double-edged sword.

The same thing that makes
them so interesting --

they're small size --

also makes them impossible to work with.

It's literally like trying to build
a statue out of a pile of dust.

And we just don't have the tools
that are small enough to work with them.

But even if we did,

it wouldn't really matter,

because we couldn't one-by-one
place millions of particles together

to build a techonology.

So because of that,

all of the promise

and all of the excitement

has remained just that:

promise and excitement.

We don't have any
disease-fighting nanobots,

there's no elevators to space,

and the thing that I'm most interested in,

no new types of computing.

Now that last one,

that's a really important one.

We just have come to expect

the pace of computing advancements
to go on indefinitely.

We've built entire economies on this idea.

And this pace exists
because of our ability

to pack more and more devices
onto a computer chip.

And as those devices get smaller,

they get faster,

they consume less power

and they get cheaper.

And it's this convergence that gives us
this incredible pace.

As an example:

if I took the room-sized computer
that sent three men to the moon and back,

and somehow compressed it --

compressed the world's
greatest computer of its day --

so it's the same size as your smartphone,

your actualy smartphone,

that thing you spent 300 bucks on
and just toss out every two years,

would blow this thing away.

Like, you would not be impressed.

It couldn't do anything
that your smartphone does.

it would be slow,

you couldn't put any of your stuff on it,

you could possibly get through
the first two minutes

of a "Walking Dead" episode
if you're lucky --

(Laughter)

The point is,

the progress is not gradual.

The progress is relentless;

it's exponential,

it compounds on itself
year after year,

to the point where
if you compare a technology

from one generation to the next,

they're almost unrecognizable.

And we owe it to ourselves
to keep this progress going.

We want to say the same thing
10, 20, 30 years from now:

look what we've done
over the last 30 years.

Yet we know this progress
may not last forever.

In fact, the party's kind of winding down.

It's like "last call for alcohol," right?

If you look under the covers,

by many metrics like
speed and performance,

the progress has already slowed to a halt.

So if we want to keep this party going,

we have to do what we've always
been able to do,

and that is to innovate.