Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.
More Quotes by Richard Smalley
Clean water is a great example of something that depends on energy. And if you solve the water problem, you solve the food problem.
I was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 6, 1943, one year to the day before D-Day, the allied invasion at Normandy. The youngest of four children, I was brought up in a wonderfully stable, loving family of strong Midwestern values.
Until late in life, I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.
My interest in science had many roots. Some came from my mother as she finished her B.A. degree studies in college while I was in my early teens.
After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.
Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.