Bernard Lucas Feringa, the 2016 Nobel laureate in chemistry, presented his pioneering work constructing molecular machines that operate on tiny scales at a lecture at Fudan University on Friday, providing visions from the frontiers of nanoscience.
Titled "The Art of Building Small: From Molecular Switches to Molecular Motors", Feringa's talk delved into his team's designs and constructions of molecular-scale creations at the Shanghai Master Forum on Science.
At the core of Feringa's work lies the concept of molecular machines — devices assembled from different molecular components that can mimic machinery by moving in response to external stimuli. Among his key innovations are molecular switches that can toggle between two states, analogous to 0 and 1 in computing, enabling these state transitions at the nanometer scale.
While this is a very fundamental area, Feringa described how nano-machines could one day transform the world. "I'm a scientist. I'm not so good at predicting," he said. "I would say the best way to predict the future is to invent it."
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