21 Quotes by Richard Smalley

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.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.

In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.

I know that, except for carbon, there would be no life in the universe. Except for this one atom, there would be no life. Well, why? When you think about it, it does get spooky. Encountering these molecules are spiritual experiences similar to what I remember in church as a child, only these are more serious.

Clean water is a great example of something that depends on energy. And if you solve the water problem, you solve the food problem.

If it ain't tubes, we don't do it.

We'd like to make it [bucky fiber] in a continuous fiber, roll it on a drum, and go fishing with it.