I was born in Iran.
I've witnessed ballistic missiles coming
down;
that make me think that OK what are
the things that I would like to change.
What are the things that they would like to impact them at the
end of the day. I think we'd need to be responsible
for using any technology
in a positive fashion.
If there's anyone out there that could steer the
thrust of technology away
from our own demise
and toward the betterment of humanity
this could be the guy.
My name is Ali Hajimiri.
I'm an educator
and an engineer
and an inventor.
Since a very young age I was really curious to find out how things
work. Any kind of toy I had a
you know within a couple of days
it was ripped apart
and open
and torn into pieces.
And you know my parents were not a huge fan
of that throughout the process.
I tried to then build things myself.
At some point I tried to make a laser when I was
I think like 10 or 11
and I didn't succeed.
But Hajimiri made up for that failure
in his adult life.
Today he holds more than 90 issued
patents and along
with his tenure at Caltech carries a reputation
of making ideas that would otherwise sound
like science fiction a reality.
Things that I work on
are some of the inventions
if you will, that I've been involved
in, they span a large gamut lensless
cameras lensless projectors
and 3-D cameras,
radar on a chip,
self-heating circuits hand-held
diagnostic devices wireless power transfer
space based solar power.
They may appear kind of seemingly unrelated
to each other but they all rely on
this underlying concept
of a phase arrays.
The phase arrays is basically
a large number of small
elements working together.
Hajimiri's inspiration for phased array technology
comes from an unlikely place-
ants.
As a child took a big jar of
glass jar and I
was digging through an ant ant hill,
and then I took a whole bunch
of ants and just dumped them in that jar.
And within a couple of days they started
building the whole nest.
It was really amazing because it showed
how you can achieve very complex
things through interactions
of simple units.
The phased arrays is basically the army
of ants.
Now instead of ants carrying dirt. imagine
millions of tiny signals working
in concert to send energy wirelessly.
This array system is the basis
for Hajimiri's latest
and most ambitious project-
collecting solar power in outer space
and beaming it down to earth.
We are in the wireless power transfer laboratory
and we are looking at
is set up for demonstration
and testing of have wireless
power transfer.
Here you have a small
version of what would be collecting
power. We are basically creating
a beam and focusing of the energy
in this location,
and what you can see is that the energy is
being transferred wirelessly
and this would be the unit building block
making the space-based
generator power station.
This is an extremely important thing because
first of all it gives access globally
to energy and power.
It doesn't introduce any greenhouse
gases or any of that sort.
In the process of making up the energy.
But the idea of sending power to Earth
from space has some pretty high
profile detractors.
Space Solar Power.
OK. The stupidest thing ever.
Skeptics like Elon Musk believe
that after multiple power conversions
and the cost of launches
and the sheer scale of such a project
makes it far too expensive
and inefficient forever trapping it within
the confines of science fiction.
And if anybody
should think, should like space solar it should be me.
All right? I've got to go to rocket company
and a solar company.
But this is of little concern to a man
who has made his living defying conventional
wisdom.
He believes that the greatest innovations
come from an active imagination.
A lot of us are inspired by science
fiction I think science fiction is
essential to the way of thinking about
making useful
and interesting things.
You start with a concept that
doesn't exist that could have been articulated
in science fiction
and you trying to see what can you
do about that.
Can you do it in its entirety.
Can you do a variation of that
and that process that's part of the creative process
right. I mean engineering
is that discipline of creativity.
The key question is that how
can you make it in such a way that it's
feasible
and also economical
and to do that you have to take
a lot of different kinds of technologies
and bring them together.
Like an army of ants all
working together at the unlikely
intersection of science fiction
and reality.
You
know nothing is done in isolation.
No one person really.
And today I think ever was doing
things by themselves. You know
if you want to go fast
go alone if you want to go far take your