-
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 objects.
-
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
how it is going to change everything.
-
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 it 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 an elevator to space
-
using carbon nanotubes.
-
You can look that up, that's true.
-
Anyways, we thought it was going to affect
-
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 --
-
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 --
-
their 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 technology.
-
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 was the same size
as your smartphone --
-
your actual smartphone,
-
that thing you spent 300 bucks on
and just toss out every two years,
-
would blow this thing away.
-
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 --
it's 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.
-
So our group's role
and our group's mission
-
is to innovate
by employing carbon nanotubes,
-
because we think that they can
provide a path to continue this pace.
-
They are just like they sound.
-
They're tiny, hollow tubes
of carbon atoms,
-
and their nanoscale size --
that small size --
-
gives rise to these
just outstanding electronic properties.
-
And the science tells us
if we could employ them in computing,
-
we could see up to a ten times
improvement in performance.
-
It's like skipping through several
technology generations in just one step.
-
So there we have it.
-
We have this really important problem
-
and we have what is basically
the ideal solution.
-
The science is screaming at us,
-
"This is what you should be doing
to solve your problem."
-
So, all right, let's get started,
-
let's do this.
-
But you just run right back
into that double-edged sword.
-
This "ideal solution" contains a material
that's impossible to work with.
-
I'd have to arrange billions of them
just to make one single computer chip.
-
It's that same conundrum,
it's like this undying problem.
-
At this point, we said, "Let's just stop.
-
Let's not go down that same road.
-
Let's just figure out what's missing.
-
What are we not dealing with?
-
What are we not doing
that needs to be done?"
-
It's like in "The Godfather," right?
-
When Fredo betrays his brother Michael,
-
we all know what needs to be done.
-
Fredo's got to go.
-
(Laughter)
-
But Michael -- he puts it off.
-
Fine, I get it.
-
Their mother's still alive,
it would make her upset.
-
We just said,
-
"What's the Fredo in our problem?"
-
What are we not dealing with?
-
What are we not doing,
-
but needs to be done
to make this a success?"
-
And the answer is
that the statue has to build itself.
-
We have to find a way, somehow,
-
to compel, to convince
billions of these particles
-
to assemble themselves
into the technology.
-
We can't do it for them.
They have to do it for themselves.
-
And it's the hard way,
and this is not trivial,
-
but in this case, it's the only way.
-
Now, as it turns out,
this is not that alien of a problem.
-
We just don't build anything this way.
-
People don't build anything this way.
-
But if you look around --
and there's examples everywhere --
-
Mother Nature builds everything this way.
-
Everything is built from the bottom up.
-
You can go to the beach,
-
you'll find these simple organisms
that use proteins --
-
basically molecules --
-
to template what is essentially sand,
-
just plucking it from the sea
-
and building these extraordinary
architectures with extreme diversity.
-
And nature's not crude like us,
just hacking away.
-
She's elegant and smart,
-
building with what's available,
molecule by molecule,
-
making structures with a complexity
-
and a diversity
that we can't even approach.
-
And she's already at the nano.
-
She's been there
for hundreds of millions of years.
-
We're the ones that are late to the party.
-
So we decided that we're going
to use the same tool that nature uses,
-
and that's chemistry.
-
Chemistry is the missing tool.
-
And chemistry works in this case
-
because these nanoscale objects
are about the same size as molecules,
-
so we can use them
to steer these objects around,
-
much like a tool.
-
That's exactly what we've done in our lab.
-
We've developed chemistry
that goes into the pile of dust,
-
into the pile of nanoparticles,
-
and pulls out exactly the ones we need.
-
Then we can use chemistry to arrange
literally billions of these particles
-
into the pattern
we need to build circuits.
-
And because we can do that,
-
we can build circuits
that are many times faster
-
than what anyone's been able
to make using nanomaterials before.
-
Chemistry's the missing tool,
-
and every day our tool gets sharper
and gets more precise.
-
And eventually --
-
and we hope this is
within a handful of years --
-
we can deliver on one
of those original promises.
-
Now, computing is just one example.
-
It's the one that I'm interested in,
that my group is really invested in,
-
but there are others
in renewable energy, in medicine,
-
in structural materials,
-
where the science is going to tell you
to move towards the nano.
-
That's where the biggest benefit is.
-
But if we're going to do that,
-
the scientists of today and tomorrow
are going to need new tools --
-
tools just like the ones I described.
-
And they will need chemistry.
That's the point.
-
The beauty of science is that
once you develop these new tools,
-
they're out there.
-
They're out there forever,
-
and anyone anywhere
can pick them up and use them,
-
and help to deliver
on the promise of nanotechnology.
-
Thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
-
(Applause)