 So we hear the nanotechnology conference here in Tessaloniki actually on the on the beach just outside Tessaloniki and right So, who are you? I am Socrates Pandelidis Professor of physics at Vanderbilt University I'm here I gave a planetary talk last night And I leave tomorrow Back to the US. I will spend four days in Cyprus before I go back and So at your presentation you were talking about Nano lots of nano stuff. Yes seeing some interesting shapes in doing some experiments Well, I don't do the experiments myself my collaborators do the experiments We do the theoretical work and do computations to get numerical solutions of the relative problems Both to Guide the interpretation of the experimental data, but we go beyond the data. We predict new things the experiments test and verify sometimes it's quite a Very intriguing interplay between theory and experiment Course back and forth usually and That's the best way to dig into the secrets of nature and figure them out in detail You were showing some very Interesting shapes. How did those shapes happen? You were like there were some triangles. Yes well When you are on the atomic scale all kinds of interesting things happen and That's where we drive Material science today on the atomic scale. We look at them with microscopes. We push them around with various external probes We calculate according to the laws of quantum mechanics Figuring out where what atoms like to do and by like it's a very simple rule Is that nature likes to go in the direction where forces push you and in general those forces? What we say lowers your energy. So what does that mean? well, the simplest thing to Look at the at some form of energy is what we call a potential energy if I take a heavy item and Put it on a table. I know if I push it off and it will fall down and It will give up Some of that energy when it hits the floor. It can do a lot of damage if it's a big heavy ball Because it would have the energy that it had at the high spot gets converted to energy of motion and Then when it hits the floor that energy will be transmitted into the floor and it could damage the floor significantly if you take a Toler table higher table and put the ball much higher and you drop it from up there You know the damage is going to be even more So the ball will always go down gravity is pulling it down Rocks go down the hill. They don't go up the hill So when they get down, they have less energy. They lower their energy every system likes to lower its energy and and Atoms have the same tendency electrons have the same tendency and Electrons are not like little billiard balls. They are very wavy kinds of things We can describe them with mathematics and that's the physical reality Businesses sort of get a feel for them and understand them, but ultimately it's They are effect and they are motion and their behavior at that minute level That gets somehow translated into macroscopic things that we see and we Relate to and so on for example Current it's a flow of electrons We can't really see the electrons directly But we see there are consequences and their images and so on and we know we have electrical current grows and lights up the light bulb But with our equations, we know exactly what the electrons are doing and That is true of all physics the same kind of physics. It's a different scale when we sent man to the moon all those Equations that describe the motion of the spacecraft are well known and Great detail and the reason we can go to the moon and we went to the moon in the 1960s was because we knew the physics of the equations of how the The rocket craft is going to move and what exactly they need to what kinds of rockets they need to fire at what strength to turn the Craft at just the right angle and get it landed on the moon Without the physics equations the laws of nature if you will that describe those things and solving them on computers The amazing thing is that in the 1960s the computers were really very primitive but they did their job and There are still people that do those calculations and pursue those things We are operating down on the scale of individual atoms and We describe their behavior in great detail And what's the name of the game there is to engineer new materials to design new materials By through calculations except an experimentation Once we understand how they behave in different materials they behave in different ways Then we can steer them in some sense we can create new structures and We discover new structures all the time by experimental means we discover them by a theoretical means when we Try and say what how would these atoms behave under these? Circumstances and we determine how they would and we say oh wow that would be wonderful If we can get them to do that kind of thing in a very controlled way We can really create a device that will be very useful The kinds of devices that we already know we have and are very useful like smartphones and televisions and All of those things came out of knowing how electrons and atoms behave at the quantum scale Nowadays the the drive for new devices new concepts and new applications new kinds of things that would change our lives that are driven More directly by quantum mechanics at that very miniscule level and still have manifestations in the macroscopic world in which we live and Then be able to benefit from devices and mechanisms and Gizmos and all kinds of things If we look back what has happened in the last 50 years where we were 50 years ago when I was growing up barely had telephones to talk with it having to put a thing on your ear with a cord that tied to somewhere and To make a call from Europe to America or vice versa you had to Call an operator and have them connect you maybe call you back later all of that It's the miracle to have a signal a bit now. What is now? It's amazing where we are So there's no telling where we will be 50 years hence now progress is much faster than it used to be and that applies to everywhere not just Devices that we use it our everyday lives and benefit from but Medicine is doing enormous strides This conference had a lot of sections on nanomedicine where Again atoms and electrons at the microscope the nanoscopic level at the minutest possible level Can be steered and organized to help us cure diseases and so on That's a new frontier that is developing and it's evolving and It is very hard to tell where it's going to be 50 years from now just like if you go back to the computers of the 1960s It would have been very hard to dream of laptops and cell phones Those guys if you told them about what do you have today? They would You're kidding me science fiction. There was science fiction that Predict that a lot of these things but They didn't get everything right. They have to have imagination. Have you often? with your collaborators and students kind of Seen new materials that like Couldn't expect or new new atoms that Were formed and suddenly, you know, how many many times you've been Creating things that were never done before and try to understand it. Yes, we do that all the time And it is true that sometimes we are surprised by things, but then say oh, that's not too strange We can understand it Research is a funny kind of thing you you have ideas you test them you do calculations you do experiments You often find things you don't expect or different things from what you thought it would happen They say oh, wow, we must have left something out of our thinking Let's go back and look at it again And oh, yes, we can understand what happened there and then oh, wow We can predict yet another thing that we didn't even think before so that is always serendipity in these things and if you play with the right thing and You have your eyes open You you can do a lot Some of the biggest discoveries were by serendipity. One example is radioactivity that Becquerel was playing in some sense with rocks that had strange properties and and He had these rocks in his drawer and he also have photographic plates in the drawer and Monday opened the drawer the plates were exposed And he knew that something must come out of the rocks some kind of radiation came out of the rocks and exposed you know, otherwise photographic plates in the dark they don't do anything and They followed up on it and it was part of the discovery of radioactivity along with Marie Curie and others and Becquerel and Marie Curie caught the Nobel Prize for their discovery and say well, he just had rocks in the drawer Yeah, but he had his eyes open and he knew what those rocks meant when they did something so there's serendipity in those things and When a smaller scale we get surprised and we find things All the time and we always hope for the big enchilada and Sometimes they're bigger and sometimes they're smaller and that's what matters in what journal the results get published and Whether you get invited talks to go to conferences and talk about them and so on so Do you collaborators and students do they just play a lot how long does it take to find a new to build something new Can you do like several during an afternoon or it takes like a month to just do one There's three searchers and I tell my students and postdocs that sort of thing I tell them a good Graduate student or if you want to be a good physicist you need to be working all the time Except when you are not working Now try to figure that one out We really your mind is on the ball essentially all the time We carry things in our heads. They are not in the drawer or in books If you don't carry things in your head, you're never going to put things together when you see the next thing You can't go back to your notebook I mean you can but you better carry a lot of things in your head and your head better be processing those things Constantly and looking for something else and so on and what I mean by that You should always be working except when you're not working You can turn your brain off sometimes if I go to enjoy a Music concert at the Symphony Hall the beach or the beach and I want to Have a beer and chat about nonsense or whatever. It's perfectly fine to do that. All right, but You can't do research and be a great scientist if you say I'm going to go to the office at 8 o'clock in the morning And go back home at 5 o'clock. I'm gonna work 40 hours a week Start back on Monday and see where I was. It doesn't work that way Can you just work by sitting here by the beach and your head or do you need a notepad or how does it work? My head is always working I'm always thinking about something and when I wake up in the morning and I Stuff in my eyes and I look there are usually at least seven different things that are competing in my head about What give attention to and what to think about Both science and other Administrative things that we always have to do budgets and other things that are bugging me And I usually try to push them outsource back to outsource those parts and we don't outsource very much We do everything in house And but you got to think about a lot of things. There's more senior you are the more chores You have to do as well just writing letters of reference for people that are looking for jobs or Do you often have this feeling that something is just nearly there and you just about to That you might have a solution for huge problems Oh that you just like feel like it's so near or something like that But actually it's it takes a long time to even and you can't get there anything is possible You sometimes have a big vision and you hope you are going to get made sometimes it delivers and sometimes it doesn't and Sometimes it's out of reach because we just can't do some things and There's another mantra that I like the difficult things don't phase us It's the impossible things that take a little longer Is it possible to go from the result and back like you want to have this result? So you try to or do you have to just look in the look in the dark all the time and not really We go backwards and forward we we scrutinize we push we shove we Probe We don't leave any stone unturned In our business you've got to look everywhere and as I said earlier You got to retain information in your head and keep processing that information Otherwise you're gonna miss a lot of things Because if the information is only in notebooks, I don't I don't keep notebooks. It's all in my head. Oh How about the computer? Well, there's you know, I don't I don't do computations myself anymore the young folks do it But Most of the things are in my head and I dredge them out as I need and I Generate new ideas from them and pass them on to those that are going to do their grant work. I react to what I hear and Experience counts in this business Because after doing this for 50 years, I've seen just about everything in my business and I React to everything and I connect things. Oh, yeah We saw that thing 35 years ago something like that was going on And let's go this way and that way and the other way and I'm sure often find something. So Experience matters a lot But build it up slowly the young folks have to do that You're working with semiconductors with IBM Sorry, I worked with yeah, we need to stop Yes in my 20 years at IBM. I was working mostly on Silicon the king of semiconductors and related materials and It was great. It was a lot of fun. Silicon was at its glory full glory at the time We were making major discoveries in how to do calculations and how to understand things That had never been understood before and we keep doing that to this day and that's the joy of discovery when you When you find things that nobody's found before nobody knew about them before You feel like screaming and there are many moments in the life of a researcher that you feel like screaming Wow And now you can make this the semiconductors and nano maybe yes, we work with semiconductors on the nano scale and All kinds of things we work with everything under the sun the materials we study them as long as they are Properties that relate to the atomic and electronic scale We don't work with structural materials very much things like you make bridges with or aeroplanes and so on done a little bit of that in my life, but we focus on things from which you get the Devices that are operating the electronics lasers that those kinds of things Okay