George M. Whitesides

“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.”

“The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it.”

“Capitalism is a wonderful economic engine, but it assigns little value to long-term projects or societal problems.”

“Because of climate changes, it's not just a question of producing energy. It's a question of producing energy in a way that we can live with in the long term. If you look at the available pieces, from conservation to nuclear, solar, whatever, and you put them all together, we can't do it.”

“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.”

“The number of people who really work creatively on new sources of water isn't enormously large for the reason that I don't think people have very many ideas on how to get fundamentally new sources of water. We sort of think we've thought that problem through. I hope that's not true.”

“Part of science is the questioning of authority, absolute freedom of ideology. The Soviets did some very good science, but when science ran into ideology, it had trouble. Science flourishes best in a democracy.”

“Science has the potential to solve all kinds of problems, but it depends on what a society wants to accomplish.”

“Simplicity, for reasons that are a little bit obscure, is almost not pursued, at least in the academic world.”

“Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.”

“We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.”