George M. Whitesides Quotes

George M. Whitesides — American Scientist born on August 03, 1939,

George M. Whitesides is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography,microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. A prolific author and patent holder who has received many awards, he received the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists in 2011... (wikipedia)

We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.

The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it.

Simplicity, for reasons that are a little bit obscure, is almost not pursued, at least in the academic world.

Nanoengineering is learning how to make devices as small as 10 to 100 atoms in width. Much of the work is going on in the electronics industry, where there is great demand to pack more components onto computer chips.

Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.

George M. Whitesides Quotes

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