Girls Gone Wild

It's a regular bacchanal in one small town

Comments (0) By Richard Connelly Thursday, Dec 8 2005

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Who's the Dummy Now?

Rice grad student Richard Booker has written Nanotechnology for Dummies, which is an actual book and not a candidate for the Oxymoron Award.

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Booker is a Ph.D. candidate in applied physics, working on creating a carbon nanowire that is more conducive than copper. Hair Balls, on the other hand, thinks copper's just fine.

A Hair Balls correspondent, however, did interview Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley, a leader in nanotechnology (and Booker's academic adviser) before Smalley died in October. We ran some Smalley quotes by Booker:

Q. "In the late '70s and early '80s, I developed a pulse laser to zap molecules that were just about to come out of the supersonic nozzle." What the heck does that mean?

A. Ohhh [pause]. Um, that's… [pause]. Oh, I don't know. See, I'm not familiar with all of his research. I don't know exactly what he did in the '70s. I could take a stab at it, but I'd rather not because I don't know in what context it's being used. I'm sorry.

Q. "The laser generates a super-hot plasma that is hotter than the surface of the sun."

A. Umm, geeez, you are getting me with these definitions. Plasma, ummm [pause]. Aww [pause]. Plasma is a gas of charged particles, and you can see it in lightning.

Moral: Do not mess with Hair Balls when it comes to nanotechnology!

Nanotechnology, in case you don't know, involves very, very, very small things. Like Enrique Iglesias's penis. (We kid!)