Words matter. These are the best Richard Smalley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.
Clean water is a great example of something that depends on energy. And if you solve the water problem, you solve the food problem.
My interest in science had many roots. Some came from my mother as she finished her B.A. degree studies in college while I was in my early teens.
It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.
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.
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 know that, except for carbon, there would be no life in the universe. Except for this one atom, there would be no life. Well, why? When you think about it, it does get spooky. Encountering these molecules are spiritual experiences similar to what I remember in church as a child, only these are more serious.
Nature – how, we don’t know – has technology that works in every living cell and that depends on every atom being precisely in the right spot. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. They’re molecules. You put the last atom in, and it’s done. Nature does things with molecular perfection.
Until late in life, I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.
Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.
