George M. Whitesides

Notable Quotes

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.

From George M. Whitesides

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.

From George M. Whitesides

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

From George M. Whitesides

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

From George M. Whitesides

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.

From George M. Whitesides