The next step in nanotechnology | George Tulevski

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2017

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Nearly every other year the transistors that power silicon computer chip shrink in size by half and double in performance, enabling our devices to become more mobile and accessible. But what happens when these components can't get any smaller? George Tulevski researches the unseen and untapped world of nanomaterials. His current work: developing chemical processes to compel billions of carbon nanotubes to assemble themselves into the patterns needed to build circuits, much the same way natural organisms build intricate, diverse and elegant structures. Could they hold the secret to the next generation of computing?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features
0:08.8	nano-architect and researcher George Tulewski,
0:12.3	recorded live at TED at IBM, 2016.
0:17.8	Let's imagine a sculptor building a statue,
0:22.7	just chipping away with his chisel.
0:28.5	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
0:34.1	direction, not from a solid block of stone, from a pile of dust, somehow
0:39.0	gluing millions of these particles together to form a statue. I know that's an absurd notion.
0:44.5	It's probably impossible. The only way you get a statue from a pile of dust is if the statue
0:50.2	built itself. If somehow we could compel millions of these particles to come together to form the
0:56.4	statue. Now, as odd as that sounds, that is like almost exactly the problem I work on in my lab.
1:03.4	I don't build with stone. I build with nanomaterials. They are these just impossibly small,
1:08.8	fascinating little objects. They're so small that if this controller was a nanoparticle,
1:13.9	a human hair would be the size of this entire room.
1:16.8	And they're at the heart of a field we call nanotechnology,
1:19.4	which I'm sure we've all heard about,
1:21.3	and we've all heard how it is going to change everything.
1:25.0	You know, when I was a graduate student,
1:26.5	it was one of the most exciting times to be working
1:28.9	in nanotechnology.
1:30.0	There were scientific breakthroughs happening all of the time.
1:33.3	The conferences were buzzing.
	...

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