I want you to think about the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the
words nanoscience and nanotechnology. For some of you it's probably something fantastic,
right, like Fantastic Voyage or Star Trek, right. Nanotechnology can take us somewhere
we've never been before. For others of you, it can be something fantastically sinister,
like nanotechnology can take the form of robots injected into our blood stream that can turn
us into zombies. Thankfully neither of those are true, yet, but for most of you, nanoscience
and nanotechnology is probably something that sounds kind of cool and you don't really know
what it is. Well, let me tell you it's not that difficult. It's just the study of materials
and devices that are at the nanometer scale, another words they're really small. How small
is the nanometer scale? Well, things you can see are on the order of the size of a pinhead
it's about a millimeter in diameter, okay. Things you can see with an optical microscope
are a thousand times smaller than that, like a red blood cell and they live in a size range
of a micrometer or so. Thousand times smaller than the red blood cell is where nanotechnology
lives. At the nanometer scale, these are some quantum dots that are a few nanometers in
diameter and you need special electron microscopes to see them, okay. Now what is really fascinating
about nanotechnology is that when you shrink materials down to the nanometer scale, they
start to behave in ways that are not so familiar to us at the macroscopic world. For example,
most of us are familiar with gold, right, shiny, usually yellow, metal, but if you make
gold and shrink it down to tiny particles at the nanometer scale, gold actually looks
pink, it turns out. Now this is not so far into most of you, right, because if you look
up at a stained glass window, the red stained glass there is actually due to scattering
of light from metal nanoparticles, okay. So this is technology that has been around for
thousands of years at some level. We're familiar with carbon, especially after summer barbequing,
right, in the form of coal, kind of brittle, black, nasty stuff. But if you take carbon
and you lay it out into a hexagonal sheet and you roll that thin sheet up into a cylinder,
you have something called a carbon nanotube, a truly remarkable material. I mean carbon
nanotubes can conduct electricity ten times better than the copper in this building for
the same diameter. They're also ten times stronger than steel but only a fraction of
their weight and they're the only material we know of that can be either semiconductors
or metals depending on how you grow them. Truly remarkable, right! Now, what about semiconductors
or minerals, as we commonly know them, right. If you take a semiconductor and you shrink
it down to the nanometer scale, for example, these quantum dots you see here, and you change
their size, you can actually change their color, right. So you can actually tune the
emission, this is fluorescents from these quantum dots, to have any color in the visible
spectrum you want, any color of the rainbow, from red to blue, just depending on their
size. So I've shown you at the nanometer scale, size matters, right. So, before nanotechnology,
the properties of the material were just due to the chemical composition. You couldn't
really change that. But now when you make things really small, you have this other handle,
you can, knob you can tune, right. You can change size and shape and that changes properties
dramatically and this is totally a new way of thinking about building blocks of matter.
So there must be something cool we can do with this, right. You're probably all thinking
I need to get my hands on some of that nanotechnology. Where can I buy it? Well let me show you the
most advanced nanotechnology product on the market today. It's a television. Pretty exciting,
hah! Actually, I just saw it in Best Buy recently. It is a gorgeous TV with beautiful reds and
greens but we've had TV's for a long time. I mean. And if you you press me and you ask
me, ten, twenty, thirty years from now, what will nanotechnology be involved in, I have
to be honest with you, I don't know, right. People in general are very bad at at predicting
where technology is going to go so far in the futures, especially scientists, actually,
hah. As an example of that, I want to show you this, this story about something you may
of heard of called the laser. So the laser was discovered in 1960. The first laser was
built by Theodore Mamen at Hughes Laboratories. He was an engineer at Bell Laboratories as
well, soon after, right. And before 1960, light was only known as light bulbs, incoherent
radiation, bathing everybody, right. But after the laser, we had something called coherent
radiation. You could focus it. You had laser beams, right. Exciting stuff! Totally new
way of thinking about light. What can we do with that? Well, the many Nobel Prize winners
at Bell Labs, there quote was, you see it on the screen. Good job guys! What are we
going to do with it? Huh, no idea. Right. They didn't know. They couldn't look that
far in the future. If we pan ahead fifty years, we know that, you now what, I'd still be in
Wegmans in the check-out line, this morning, on a Saturday morning, right, if it wasn't
for the check-out scanner, which is a laser, it is based on a laser, right. Students coming
to the University of Rochester would actually have read books before getting here if it
wasn't for the laser cause there would be no WII, there would be no Play station, they're
be no DVD's or Blu Rays, all based on a laser. Great advances in in medicine and dentistry,
due to a laser. Ah, for example, you can now easily remove that tattoo of your ex-boyfriend,
okay, due to a laser. And we do have much more efficient ways of killing each other
because of a laser. Ah, the the upshot of this, though, is that collateral damage has
been reduced by orders of magnitude with our smart weapons, okay. None of this could have
been predicted in in 1960, none of it, okay. So, for the remainder of the talk, ah, you
can take everything with a grain of salt because I am going to tell you where I think nanotechnology
may go in the next ten or twenty years. And one area is solving the the energy problem.
You know, we use a lot of energy in this country and and around the world. You can just see
that by just looking at the map of the United States at night and how much energy we burn.
You can find Rochester easily on the map. You can even find Utica or something like
that there as well, right. Um, but working with Rich Eisenberg in the chemistry department
here at the University of Rochester, ah, we have taken quantum dots, these little semi-conductor
particles on the nanometer scale, mixed them with water, added some Vitamin C and then
added nickel salts, this is like table salt, sodium chloride. We replaced the sodium with
nickel and we just let it sit out in the sun and what we generate is hydrogen, lot of hydrogen.
And hydrogen can be put into a fuel cell and then burnt. The only by-product is water,
right. You can use that to generate electricity, to power your house or in this case to power
a a cool looking mini cooper automobile, right. However, I drove here in a a gasoline power
car. I'm very happy with it. Alright. It works well. Um, this may save the planet some day,
a small thing like that, right, but it won't change my life immediately. Um, I am happy
with the gas powered care. Is there something nanotechnology can do potentially that you
just can't have done right now. That's impossible, right, almost fantasy. Well we think that
might be in the area of imaging, okay. So there are many different kinds of imaging.
Um, ultrasound imaging is a is a great form of imaging technique. It is completely non-destructive.
You can get wonderful three dimensional images. You can image in in really difficult environments,
like water or or the body and you can image in real time. The problem with ultrasound
imaging is it has terrible resolution. This image is actually an ultrasound image of my
nephew a Cameron when he was a inside my sister and she was very excited. She e-mailed me
this image and she said, "We're having a boy". Look at the arrow. Laughing. I can't tell,
okay. Clearly we need better resolution to see that. Um, so if we had ultrasound imaging
at the nanometer scale, right, thousand times, ten thousand times better than what we have
now, what could we do with it? Well, one thing you could do with it is you could image cells,
not just whole cells but parts of cells. You could image proteins or enzymes on the surface
of cells or maybe inside of a cell. And in the same way that we use the ultrasound image
of the of the growing baby, to tell the health of the baby, maybe can use an ultrasound image
of the cell parts to tell how healthy the person is. Maybe use it somedays as a way
to treat, diagnose disease. The problem with that is there are no ways right now to generate
ultrasound frequencies high enough to get nanometer scale images. It is just impossible,
right, until until the development of these carbon nanotubes. They actually can vibrate
with frequencies high enough to get wave lengths short enough that you can potentially get
ultrasound images. We're far far from that right now. But we are starting around this
direction and we are very excited by it cause it has great potential. So in summary, nanoscience
and nanotechnology, game changing technology, right, for now. Before nanotechnology, you
only had what you were given, chemically as a material. You couldn't change it. When you
make it really small, you can tailor its properties based on size and shape. Size matters now
and what we think is someday nanotechnology will enable things to be possible that currently
are not possible. Um, some people think big. In our research we tend to think very small.
Thanks very much.