Galo Soler-Illia: Size does matter
Good evening everybody.
Today I have good and bad news.
Bad news is, as Matías has already said, size matters.
Good news is, when things are very small
they have new and wonderful properties which are worth experiencing.
But don't think I am only going to talk about sex,
I am going to talk about Nanotechnology. And what is Nanotechnology?
It is what you, your children and your grandchildren are going to talk about the next 50 years.
They are the new technologies which are based on controlling matter
and make objects small enough, the size of nanometers.
But well, what is a nanometer?
A nanometer is just an unit of measurement, an unit of length.
It's a billionth of a meter, ten to the minus nine meters, like Adrian Paenza would say.
We are used to live within the meter's scale,
also the millimeter, which is a thousand times smaller, we can see it in a ruler.
When we go down a thousand times more,
we see a micron, which is the world of bacterium that we see with a microscope.
And we still have to go down a thousand times more to see a nanometer.
It is something which is a thousand million times smaller than a meter, it is something that for us is invisible,
it is something that, obviously, challenges our perception.
Imagine a hair, a hair's diameter is sixty thousand nanometres, that's a lot.
But for physicists and chemists it is not that big thing,
it is not the smallest thing that we can see and we can handle.
Because a nanometer, ultimately, is ten atoms placed one next to the other.
So in the nanometric scale it's aproximately in the middle of what we know that we can do.
Well, what I'm showing to you here is...
Oranges!
Well, the diameter of an orange is aproximately ten centimeters and I am going to do this to illustrate.
An atom is a thousand million times smaller than an orange.
What I am showing here is a photo, in its centre there's something that looks like a pile of orange,
but it is not a pile of oranges, it is a pile of atoms.
Except that the forces keeping together those atoms are not exactly the same than the forces for the oranges.
Atoms are atracted to each other by certain intermolecular and interatomic forces.
There are two interesting things about this, first that you can see that atoms can be seen,
because, let's see, who has been said that atoms can't be seen?
They were wrong, they can be seen.
Not only atoms can be seen, they can be touched.
In the last twenty years, enough technology has been developed
in order to see, touch and even manipulate matter at an atomic-molecular scale.
So this huge progress has made nanotechnology possible -
where we have to control objects that are more or less
the size of a hundred atoms-.
To illustrate the properties and the reasons why it is interesting to make something so small
of a nanometric size, what is that useful for?
I'm going to show you something. Everybody knows, here in this room, that metals,
for example, are an atypical material. They are bright, for instance, like gold
which is bright, a good electrical and heat conductor,
it melts at a thousand degrees (Celcius), and it is golden, of course.
Well, we have cut wires, we have scratched metals and we get some awful metallic shavings.
But they still have exactly the same properties.
What happens? Properties haven't changed.
Well, the fantastic and mind-blowing thing about the nanoworld and nanotechnology
is that when we take a material and make it smaller,
the size between one and a hundred nanometers, now we are in a suitable scale,
the materials' properties change dramatically and completely.
We don't have golden and bright gold anymore; we have, for example,
if our particles or our nanoparticles of gold are five nanometers long
we have red gold, or purple gold if it is twenty nanometers long,
or light blue if it's a hundred nanometers long. This is crazy.
Imagine, and I'm just telling you the tip of the iceberg, the power that we have
and the wonders of this new world in front of our eyes.
We can completely change the properties of matter
by just changing the size of the material. So, size matters, that's true.
And what are these things useful for? Well, nanoparticles of gold have been used
from tinting the glasses of the XII century cathedrals
to making nowadays, for example, pregnancy test or biological tests.
Nanoparticles of gold are used for this.
But what I want to clarify here is that we have like a new dimension
in the science of materials, and in life, and in technology.
We can do virtually whatever we want with matter now.
And this nanometric world, this nanoworld is like a magic scale.
It's a magical point in the dimensional scale. Why is the nanometer important?
Because of the properties of nanomaterials, that's how we call them, which are completely crazy,
and sometimes fall away from our intuition.
They are these colored things, shinny things, things that sneak out,
they are typical of this length scale and can be manipulated virtually as we want.
And how do we get to this nanoworld in which the materials have those properties
which are intermediate, between the molecular atomic world or our
everyday world in which things fall? Well, we can get there from both sides:
We can get there making bigger things smaller or making smaller things bigger,
molecule by molecule, atom by atom.
Here are some building blocks of that nanometric world.
Scientist have gone crazy the last twenty or thirty years making things
in the nanoworld so amazing, like rolling carbon to make a tube
harder than steel.
So there's a zoo of new materials with totally new properties
that can revolutionize our life.
And where do those nanometric building blocks go to? They go to technologies.
Nowadays nanotechnology is something that is starting and there's already like a thousand products out there,
and they are in lots of everyday things like, for example, a car.
One: at the heart of a car's catalyst there are metallic nanoparticles
which make the emissions purer so they don't pollute.
Or we can have green tyres in our car reinforced with nanoparticles
which allow to reduce fuel consumption and at the same time send
less waste to the enviroment when we take a turn.
What else is nanotechnology? Really, big things.
For example, Del Potro's racquet is made with nanotechnology.
It's made of a polymer, with a plastic reinforced with nanoparticles
in a way that, when I hit the ball - Del Potro, not me because I'm terrible at it-
the racquet is hard, but it doesn't vibrate, so the hit has much more control.
Well, nanotechnology is in every important issue of humanity.
For example, concerning the energy issue, we will be able to make solar cells
much more efficient, lighter, more sustainable and even flexible
so we will be able to sew it to our clothes.
We will be able to work with the enviroment, keeping records and detecting pollutants
much more easily, catching them with more efficiency and destroying them
and turning them into harmless molecules.
And a huge bet is being made in health care. We will also be able to make
tiny nanoparticles, nanosystems that can go through our vessels
through our arteries and detect ill cells, heal them and give them the right medicine.
This that seems science fiction, a delirium,
you're going to see it, we are going to see it in twenty years.
Where is this made, in Harvard, at the M.I.T., at such important places?
It is made everywhere, but also in Argentina. This is our lab,
for example, which is in Constituyentes and General Paz Avenue. We have our lab
as well as an impressive collection of paintings, I want to remark this
because it's nice to work in a nice place, not all chemists are the whole day
mixing things in dark places, and drinking them ocassionally.
This may happen on a Saturday night, but not always.
And what do we do? Basically, we make sponges with nanometric holes.
How do we make these sponges? We use all the chemistry there is on the shelves:
we use soap, we put stuff, we mix and we get a sponge
with small holes, nanometric holes. Why do we make these holes?
They are, for example, traps for toxic molecules.
These molecules get inside the holes and when we light our material
with sunlight, those molecules are destroyed.
This that seems so crazy, so sophysticated, this kind of materials. We can make pounds
of these materials and put them inside a chemical reactor that purifies
for example, with the sun, the water of isolated populations in the middle of the puna,
like the Atomic Energy Commission is doing within a project.
See how interesting it is that nanotechnology also has a social role.
We can also put molecules inside these holes to make them produce DNA
and carry a DNA factory in our pockets. We can imitate the wings of butterflies -
butterfly wings have a very special glow because of their nanostructure-
and we can imitate them with our chemistry and then we can make a steam sensor
to put it in a petrochemical plant, in a gas station or in a car's interior.
And who does these things?
Which kind of people make these things?
People in black clothes, like these, all messed up?
No, ordinary people like you, like us.
Here we have, for example, a photo of our group.
In our group we have chemists, physicists, biologists, engineers.
Why? Because nanotechnology is multidisciplinary.
We are several disciplines working at the same time in order to solve really complex problems,
that will have application in the future and right now.
And what does stand out in all these joyful people
you can see here, who have obviously drunk a little bit, in a photo after a thesis?
Not only the preparation, the strength, the study and the will to make things,
but specially the will to make things, the passion they put on this.
Being a scientist is not just about thinking. How do we spend the whole day thinking?
Because you have the passion for this, you want to do it. And see how interesting is being a scientist,
that you can - with what you know - change the world. You can find new things in the world
and you can act to make it a better world.
And this generates lots of energy and lots of adrenaline.
In fact, Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientist of humanity,
he said that everytime he found something new, he felt as if he was a child
running through a beach and that he found a seashell nicer than others
and he was very happy with his seashell, but that in front of him there was the huge ocean of truth.
And this is how we are, we are curious, we search, we try to dive a little bit,
even if it is by the shore of that ocean of truth, to bring back new things.
And sometimes it's hard to say why we are here, what are we doing.
And we do it because we like it and because we have the vocation,
and sometimes it's hard to take a leap and find our vocation.
And I've been once - I've always liked chemistry - I've been sitting there once
in an audience, like you, and there was a guy like me here, at the front,
and I was wondering: Can I do chemistry, will I be able to do science?
And the person who was here at that time, like twenty years ago
he said, '' Yes, you can."
He gave such a beautiful speech about chemistry in particular and about science in general,
that I said ''This guy is crazy, I have to do chemistry.''
And here I am, fifteen years later I married his daughter, without knowing it.
Some stories don't have a happy ending.
But well, I've got married, I've had children, I've moved forward and now I see how
my children go forward, how they grow up, and I realize that they are developing their skills,
that they are discovering the world, and let me tell you one more thing:
Follow your vocation, follow your inner call.
Why? Because if you do the things your soul tells you to do,
you will move forward, you will always do well and you will be happy.
As happy as I was when I received my chemistry game.
Thank you.