Vladimir Bulović

INTERVIEWER: Today is December 16, 2011. I'm Bill Lattanzi. And today, as part of the MIT150 Infinite History project, we're speaking with Vladimir Bulovic, professor of electrical engineering, the director of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, an award that recognizes MIT faculty who have made exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and education of undergraduates at the Institute.

Welcome, Professor Bulovic, and thank you for speaking with us.

BULOVIC: My pleasure to be here.

INTERVIEWER: You've said in other interviews, you're trying to train the next generation of leaders, and that at MIT, we know how to do this. And I'm sure there's a lot of interest. How do you train the next generation of leaders? What's the method?

BULOVIC: It's very easy, actually, at MIT. You start with extremely good material, which is our students. In many ways, universities pride themselves by being able to provide exceptionally good education. And yeah, indeed, as faculty, we try to offer the best class we can. MIT, I think, excels in that.

But that's, I don't think, most of the education a student gets when they get to MIT. I think most of the education a student gets is from their peers-- the fact that, on the undergrad level, it's really the dorm room, or it is the dining hall, that most of the experiences that will shape you will be given to you. And the good thing about it is that you're surrounded by incredible other young people, full of enthusiasm, who see the future that, maybe a little vaguely, but certainly with you, in conversation will discover what needs to be done next.

So we start with extremely good raw material. And then the best we can do is excite them, show them what makes us excited about the world we see ahead of us. We have maybe a little more perspective than they do. We've seen more as faculty. But they are the ones who need to do the work. So they're the ones who will inherit it and take on and define the next set of milestones. For us, it's to tell them the few first few we see and see if they can achieve them, and then learn from them as well on what is it that we might have been missing.

And their usefulness and charisma and daring of exploring new things, often you find that that's a great inspiration of what you should really be thinking of as a faculty.

INTERVIEWER: So you find young people coming out with a fresh eye inevitably are seeing things in a new way?

BULOVIC: Yeah, often a very misguided way, which is wonderful, because once in a while you stop and say, well, maybe it's not so misguided, maybe this is not an entirely crazy way to think about it. And in that, you inject a little bit of your own wisdom that you might have gained through the years and realize, oh, maybe I never would have thought of doing that, but since it's adjusted, let me try.

On the undergrad level, I see that. On the undergrad level, I see that real enthusiasm. On the graduate level, there is already a semi-formed personality of someone who already has a great deal of investment, or at least passion, that they feel they want to make the best solar cells, they want to make the best light bulbs, they want to save the world in this or that way. And that's wonderful.

What I often love to do-- well, what I think is important to do with individuals like that is maintain their enthusiasm with a dose of reality, if possible. I often start by challenging their notions, not to be contrarian, but only to point to the practicality of some of the challenges. If I'm going to talk about solar cells, I'm going to go ahead and save the world with solar technologies, right? That's what I want to do. Well, that's a great idea. I'm a director of the Solar Frontiers Center. I truly believe in it as well. But it will take me a long time to make enough solar cells to truly make a difference.

And you can ask how long will it be? Well, if I put down solar cells as fast as I could put down roads, it will take 10 years, 11 to reach 10 percent of electricity needs of US. So give me 100 years of deploying solar cells, and maybe I'll be able to reach that goal of truly making a difference, and only if you have a battery technology that goes with it, that doesn't exist as of today. So that doesn't mean that I want to quelch their enthusiasm, but I do like to give them that dose of reality so that the next thing they think of will solve the battery issue, or will solve the deployment issue that right now truly is the Achilles heel of the technology.

And what you often find is you pose a problem like that, and the students just fly with it. They come up with extremely innovative ways of completely rethinking the whole concept of why is this done or that done.

INTERVIEWER: They're problem solvers. You lay out a big vision, and then start solving problems?

BULOVIC: In many ways. I'm an electric engineering professor. So the students I see are very much hands-on students. All of that is rooted in theory. So often, what I find are the best solutions are the ones that are willing to go ahead and try out stuff. But at the same time, students who step back and ask themselves, how come the world is this way? and jot stuff on paper, do a bit of analysis, model, and then recognize that the first experimental was faulty or not complete for some reason based on the numerical work they've just done, and then propose the second thing to do, implement it again, get partway there, fail, in some respects, only to again learn what to do yet again. So that persistence and discovery is extremely important.

INTERVIEWER: In the humanities, Samuel Beckett says his method is-- or character says-- fail, try again, fail better.

[LAUGHTER]

BULOVIC: Yes, exactly.

INTERVIEWER: So you've said also that it's key for students to know the difference between science and technology. And I wonder if this taps into what you're talking about now. And I just want to ask the simple question, what's the difference? And why don't students know it?

BULOVIC: I think many of the faculty don't know it, and I think much of the world doesn't know it. I mean, it's pervasive to recognize that we don't really appreciate where one stops and the other one starts. And the way I look at my work is very much too trifling to do. I like to make something that is useful, broadly useful. Yet I'm a nanoscientist, I'm a nanotechnologist, a electrical engineer, for goodness sake, and yet I'm willing to use the word "science" in what I do. That's because it's integral to everything that we do. It's all about how the world is done on the nanoscale that will enable me to give you a yard-by-yard square sheet of something. Is it a solar cell, or a display, or a sensor, or whatever it is?

And so, being able to link the two and recognize when one starts and the other one stops, there's no clear boundary. I mean, I need to know the basic science. And when I'm down on using my pencil and scribbling stuff down or typing a code to model this, that's science. And then I go ahead and try it out. Well, am I now doing engineering or technology? Well, not really. I'm just testing the science.

I'm generating a test bit to examine the idea. And then what next? Well, the next thing to do is actually to make something that actually works and test does it work very well. So am I doing science or engineering? Well, often both. Often at that point, I'm turning on my little LED to see the light bulb glow. And I say, well, it's glowing. This is great. I can give this to someone else to start using it. But it's not glowing quite bright enough. It's not quite as efficient. Why is that? Well, now I'm back in science.

So it's this feedback that enables you at the end to make something truly worthwhile, at least in my own experience. And if it ever becomes just purely one or the other, it's a wonderful endeavor. It's a truly wonderful endeavour just to have it pure as well, except you, in the technology end of the things, you're then taking on already solved problem and you're trying to scale it. And development is a very challenging issue, but a challenge of a different kind than understanding how to develop it.

And if you're in a step before, which is go ahead and give me the basics of why these things work, beautiful as well in so many ways, yet not really practical for truly making a difference in that encapsulation of just being pure science without it seeing a link to how to link to the technology. In many ways, I play right in that cusp of the two. And I do see the feedback across the technology and science being extremely important in order to advance.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds like the borders are so porous that it shouldn't matter as much which you think you're working in. But are there problems if you mistake the one for the other?

BULOVIC: I think the best thing to do is to have a buddy, and have a buddy that you can trust and that understands the complementary part that you don't. I, at least in my own experience, have fantastic time working with chemists. My very close friends are Tim Swager and Moungi Bawendi in the Chemistry department, who both make chemicals, that then I can imagine how to use.

I would not have the slightest chance of knowing how to even start making the chemicals that they make. But we do get a vial of either a powder, of polymer, or molecules from Swager, or we get a vial of little glowing quantum dots, and we go ahead and now, say, OK, there's this nanomaterial. It's magical. They made it. What is it? You do optical characterization, and you go ahead and check out where the light gets absorbed, what kind of light gets emitted. Then you start saying, well, what can I do with this that really makes a difference?

So you work with Tim Swager and say, well, you tell me that this polymer is extremely sensitive to chemicals, like TNT, dynamite, great. I know how to actually make a really good solid-state, thing you can hold in your hand chemical detector. As a matter of fact, you told me a way to start it. Make a tin of film, go ahead and expose it to TNT, and it's going to stop glowing.

And this stopping of the glowing is because of the chemistry that Tim Swager does in it. And then I start thinking, you know, there's a phenomena in optics known as lasing. If I can go ahead and use that very same glowing material and make a laser out of it, a laser's an amplifier of optical events. And you tell me your film is going to slowly stop glowing in presence of TNT. Maybe I can amplify it if I make that film into an optically pumped laser.

And indeed you can, we found out. And this way, you can actually increase the sensitivity detection of that dimming of the flow a thousandfold, so that you can actually make a thousandfold more sensitive detector, even more sensitive than a dog's nose, which is our best detector there is, in sniffing out, actually, explosives, for example. Now, the reason why I cited it as one of the many, many examples, it's that interplay between his materials. I would have no idea how to make something that's chemically sensitive, but I do know how to manipulate the electrons and photons and think about stimulated events that utilize concepts in physics and concepts in conventional optoelectronics to then connect to this nanoscale of material space, and then make, at the end, a product or an item that has never been seen before, or has never be quite performing to the level.

INTERVIEWER: So this seems like a perfect example of the kind of interdisciplinary work that goes on at MIT. It seems more than other places, and seems increasingly vital in the 21st century as different fields kind of converge on one another. So I'm wondering, is my perception right that that's a hard thing to do at most places? And what is it that makes MIT different?

BULOVIC: Well, I do emphasize to people two things about MIT whenever I think about what really makes us truly different. And this is when I get the graduate student who's thinking about Stanford, Princeton, Caltech, or MIT. And you say, well- at least I do-- all those places are great, and all of those places can really give you a good education, and in many ways, your primary education, especially as a graduate student, is very much linked to your research group. So all these places have great research groups. You'll do great.

One difference at MIT is that we're all connected via corridors. And that seems like a small thing, but there's another element to that. And that is that all our buildings were built in about the same time. So in some respects, they all look equally drabby or equally good. You never have a sense that you left your own environment.

You start in my office. You can walk down the corridor and take a left, go down, take a right. You're now in the chemistry wing, looks just about the same. There's no psychological barrier to opening a door and feeling like you're in someone else's turf. You're indeed with yet another colleague who happens to have an interesting thing to tell you. And his door is open. That's the second thing that really matters. Hence it's very easy to knock and say, hello, and introduce.

And I've never found a lack of ability to develop a relationship at MIT. I always found that, if I asked and suggested, there was always a reciprocal response from the other faculty member. This is a very open campus, very, very open in both the way we interact with our students and interact with other faculty members. Everyone goes by first name. There's no professor this or that. I go by Vladimir with my students, and they clearly expect me to reciprocate by calling them by their first names.

That, I think, puts a level of collegiality and a level playing field, whatever. I can't rest on my laurels. There are plenty of brilliant people on this campus, but you wouldn't know it by looking at their office that they're any more special than anyone else just down the hall. And they wouldn't act as if they're any more special either. They will actually just engage you in a conventional conversation, tell you all that you would like to know as long as you reciprocate in the same way.

INTERVIEWER: I don't think I've ever been in an institution with more open doors, literally open doors, than MIT. You can just walk into any building at any time. And I too have sensed this lack of hierarchy and pure interest in the content. People are more interested in the content, it seems, than position.

BULOVIC: I also found that, if I look at presentations of people who, let's say, want to represent a center, there's a true joy in a director presenting their colleagues' work. It is not as if people are necessarily favoring their own little research and saying, this is the best thing to do. I find myself, at least as I'm presenting, as I run these different centers, I find it just joyful to be allowed to present my colleagues' work, which is just brilliant in so many ways. And emphasizing the brilliance of it makes me feel proud to be able to have a chance to share it.

So I guess the other thing that really distinguishes us is that we truly do take true pleasure in our colleagues' achievements. And that, I think, at the end, breeds the collegiality that's truly unsurpassed.

INTERVIEWER: Related to that, just-- I think you may have just answered this. But what is your chief pleasure then in teaching?

BULOVIC: Well, there are two products that we make as an institute, as a university, only two. One is knowledge, new ideas, new patents, new papers. And the other one is people who are capable to take those ideas and actually push them forward or generate new ideas thanks to the fact that we managed to show them how to get to the first one. So my joy is when I see an aha moment, when I say something in a classroom and a student then back says, oh, that's what you meant. Yeah, that's what I meant.

It's a small thing, and it's not like it's going to change your life tomorrow. But at that moment, your life just got a little broader, and you got kind of a picture of where I was heading. And a few times, you get questions from the students. They also say, I can't answer that because I never thought of it that way, but you know what, I'll come back tomorrow because that's a really good thing to ponder. And you come back tomorrow, and you kind of try to -- and say, well, I thought of it and it's just this, or maybe I thought of it and that's a really good line of research to pursue. Sure, let's think about it more.

So my joy is in recognizing, for undergraduates, it's recognizing those aha moments. With graduate students, typical graduate student in my group stays for about five years, and I like to emphasize that, with them, as I start, that first two years, more likely or not, I'll be saying a lot of stuff, and I'll be telling them a whole bunch of things, and the latter three years, two and a half, it's their job to teach me, because at that point, they are nearing being the world experts in what they're doing. By the five years' mark, they are the world experts. I mean, that's their goal. They should be. In that little discipline, little subfield of a little subfield, they should be the best in the world doing that.

And hence, I cannot match their understanding of what it truly is, but I'll revel in being able to talk to them about it, because, I mean, how often do you get the chance to be next to world experts in things that I care about? Because, indeed, we grew together. So my joy is in seeing that.

Now, the next step beyond that, if my students are able to get jobs and actually make a difference in the world, I revel in that as well. I mean, in many ways, what I value, again, is that exportation of knowledge, and people who are capable to take that knowledge to fruition of some sorts. And it can mean either generating that little idea we had, or generating jobs that are carrying out the little idea, starting little companies that can actually make a difference to someone, or if we have a big idea, saving the energy footprints of this or that village by introduction of this or that technology. There are many ways to take joy out of it, but it's all about advancement. It's all about advancement of people and knowledge.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, and you mentioned spin-off companies. I know you've been involved with a lot. I know you've got a million different things going on. So what's the process that leads to a student or grad student spinning a startup company out of your lab? And how do you participate in that?

BULOVIC: Well, we need to have a good idea. I mean, we do have a lot of patents that we filed within MIT. I think at this point, I have maybe 50 issued patents by the United States, maybe more than that internationally. But it's all the same idea. So patents are good, because those allow you to have something to bargain with as you want to start the company.

How does a student start the company? Well, let's start with a good idea. And we started, for example, QD Vision was the first company we started from my group. Before that, I had the chance of participating and observing being a graduate student who was assisting others start companies. So my own project adviser, Steve Forrest at Princeton, was very entrepreneurial, is still very entrepreneurial. And one of the things that I was working on as a graduate student was organic light-emitting devices. And I had the chance to see what it means to try to launch a technology.

We started with no patents. We had just a few demonstrations. It was a very hot and very interesting field to be in, a whole bunch of really neat science, but also nifty technologies-- LEDs that are transparent, that look just like a piece of glass. And, indeed, Minority Report is a movie, has used some of those ideas to kind of show really cool TV displays or displays you can flex.

So they're as thin as a sheet of paper, just a variety of simple gizmo-like things you can imagine. But underlying all that is how the molecules get electrically excited. So I realized that in my own graduate research, I could go ahead and develop these ideas, or go ahead and patent it, or go ahead and then make a few gizmos, then we'll go ahead and show it to some people that might care about it. We'll have to process a thought on, how valuable is this for the world? Is this truly groundbreaking? Is this earth-shattering in some way? Is this going to interest anyone?

And even if it does interest someone, is the market big enough for anyone to actually care to invest in this? And is this something that could sustain one job or 50 jobs or 1,000 jobs? And after that little economic thinking on how far can you go, then you say, well, how can I raise the money? Well, I can go and try my best to get a few grants, and maybe in a year I'll get another grant. And I'll have two guys run this thing, and eventually that might blossom. Or I can go ahead and say, well, if this is such a great idea, and let's say the market is $100 billion in display technologies, well, maybe I can go and ask for $10 million from a venture capitalist, because he wants to get $100 million.

If he gives me $10 million, he wants tenfolding return on his money. So I can say, well, there's $100 billion. So come up with that technological landscape that, indeed, is rich enough to be able to support initial fruit of the development that you have from your lab. With that, come up with a really enthusiastic student. And this is not just technically savvy, but someone who has a vision to see where the economic benefits of this technology, and be able to speak to it in a way that would enable others to see that vision, because you have nothing in your hand except a little gizmo, and you're selling an ability to change the world. Well, the only way you can do that is if you have that power of persuasion in your words and in your ability to paint that picture for people where this can go, and provide a technical roadmap that spells out, step by step, what needs to be done.

So often what we do, if a student would like to start a company, first thing to do is to recognize we need a team. We need a technical lead, maybe the student. We need a technological development team, which is maybe, again, this one student, and then have a faculty member like myself, have a good advisor from Sloan School or from the angel community around Boston, put the package like that to four or five people, walk into an office of VC, present it, but present it in a way that will tell you that in five years you'll get somewhere.

And often, it ends up with a concrete job for the students, and it will never be any better than that, because they are the most enthusiastic people to fly this technology. They're the ones who invented it in the lab. They're the ones who saw it from the seed, growing into a sapling, growing into a true thing that can actually change the world. So you have all your needs. You have enthusiasm, brilliance of students, and you have the financial support from the back. My job then just becomes to stand on the side, observe, and once in a while give a suggestion that might help out a tad more. But really, at that point, it goes into students' hands that are now PhD doctors that know what they're doing.

INTERVIEWER: So again, it's this emerging theme of integration, where the idea is just one piece of it. Communication is as important, yeah?

BULOVIC: Very much so.

INTERVIEWER: I want to go back to the QD Vision idea, which as I understand it is a much more efficient light bulb, basically.

BULOVIC: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: And it works with something called quantum dots.

BULOVIC: Yes, invented by my colleague, professor Moungi Bawendi, in Chemistry.

INTERVIEWER: So what are quantum dots? And in layman's terms, how do you make a light out of dots?

BULOVIC: Well, if you have ever drank Gatorade, you might have found, once in a while under sunlight, it appears to be glowing almost. And it actually is. What's glowing inside that is molecules, little items that we call molecules. And we're not scared of molecules. We think, well, molecules, that's usual stuff.

Well, they're one nanometer in size. Those are nano items, that you optically or electrically excite them and they glow. So many nano items are surrounding us everywhere. Car paints are also made of nano items. That's a use of nanotechnology that happens to be molecules. They happen to be coloring our cars. Pigments on inkjet printed paper, another example, again, one nanometer-size elements. And we don't even think of it as one nanometer-size elements. We think of it as a print.

Stained glass windows, those are nano balls of metal inside pieces of glass. In that case, they happen to have a particular color absorption and reflection property that allows you to make a stained glass. So these are all little nano items. So among them are possibilities to take a chunk of stone, and stone in this case would be phosphite, cadmium selenide, zinc sulfide-- these are crystals that come as big little chunks of stone. And I'll take a chisel and chisel out just the tiniest little stone. No, we don't really chisel anything out, but imagine doing that.

And now we have a little chunk of stone that is 30 atoms across, let's say. So that little item is so small. It's 30 atoms. So you say, well, if I'm an electron, it might seem like a big enough box for me to roam. It is, but even electrons like more than just 30 atoms to roam across.

And it turns out that I can-- I can't, but my colleague, Moungi Bawendi, can. He can choose the size of the box he makes. He can make these little chunks of stone using chemicals. He mixes up chemical A and chemical B. One contains, let's say, cadmium. Another one contains selenium atoms. You stick them in a pot of hot oil. Cadmium falls off. Selenium falls off. They swim in this pot of hot oil. Cadmium meets selenium. They bond. They form a tiny little crystal. And you keep on cooking this, and more cadmium adds in and more seleniums add in. And now I'm going to cool it down. And what I'm going to be left with is a solution with a whole bunch of little crystals. If I cooked the solution for a long time, the crystals will get big. If I cooked the solution for a short time, they would only manage to be very small ones. So what can I do with those?

Well, they're just of the size that electrons can be inside them, clearly, because everything's made of atoms that had electrons in them. But the size of the box is a little bit too small. And this is manifested in a following way. It's manifested by giving you small crystals.

They'll be blue in both their absorption and their glowing luminescence. Big crystals, they'll be red in both their absorption and luminescence. And the crystals in between, they'll be the colors that are in between those. So if you're a little bit bigger than blue crystal, you'll be green. A little bit bigger than the green crystal, you'll glow yellow, orange, red.

As you change the size from, let's say, three nanometer crystals, 10 atoms across to nine nanometer crystals, 30 atoms across, so that's the brilliance and simplicity of it, where you can ask next is, how come different-sized crystals have different color? I just told you they do, but how come? Well, there's one thing that is true that we never tell people, and that is that electrons really are waves.

We think of electrons as particles, but they're really waves, just the same way as the photons are both waves and particles. The two happen to be exactly the same in many ways. And so if electron is a wave, it needs to resonate. It needs to bounce back and forth off the walls of this particle. Give me the small particle, and the wave of the electron will be very, very short, which means its energy will be high. If I make the electron that sits in a bigger box, its wavelength will be longer, which means its energy would be less.

And this leads to the higher energy, small particles; bigger energy, larger particles. Another analogy that Moungi Bawendi would say, he'd say, when you play violin and you pluck a string and you hear a sound, now go ahead and press down the string and make the length of the string a little shorter, pluck it down. You'll hear a higher note, same thing. Give me a smaller box, you'll pluck the note and you'll find that the color of light coming out is blower.

INTERVIEWER: So we're going to have sheets that can project any color, like a television?

BULOVIC: So yes. So now take these little quantum dots, and ink them over a surface, and ink this area here blue, and this area green, and this area red. These areas will contain many, many quantum dots, because areas are maybe only 20 microns across. 20 microns is, like, 1/5 of the thickness of your hair. But those 20 microns will contain thousands of dots. So ink an area with some green, some blue, and some red, and you can optically excite them to get, again, colors coming back at our eye, or you can maybe put electrodes on top and the bottom of these sheets of quantum dots and electrically excite them. And when you electrically excite them, they'll flow.

And a good example of that, I'd like to emphasize or point out, is a pickle. So a pickled cucumber, pickle, if you go ahead and put two electrodes in a pickle and you apply enough voltage, like 110 volts, you'll start observing a yellow glow coming out of it, because you're exciting sodium atoms inside the pickle. Sodium is from sodium chloride from the pickle ink of the pickle. Sodium is about a nanometer in size or less, and so here's a nano item glowing, electrically excited by the electrodes. Same thing here, except rather than needing 110 volts, we slice the pickle really, really thin, and so to generate same kind of fields, you only need about five volts, or three volts to excite the very thin layer of dots that you can say is akin to sodium inside the pickle.

INTERVIEWER: So is the idea then that the dots can be used in any place you need illumination, from a regular light bulb to a television screen to the screen over Times Square?

BULOVIC: In many ways, yes. I mean, the quantum dots themselves are the ultimate, in many ways, light source, as long as optically or electrically excited. But the beauty of them is they can tailor for you the spectrum of light that you will see. They'll give you warm light or cold light, all by choosing a different amount of mixtures of the reds, greens, or blues.

INTERVIEWER: And when can I buy this at Home Depot?

BULOVIC: So today, you can buy light bulbs, but these are light bulbs that are optically excited. So essentially, what you can do today, you can go ahead and look at the most efficient lighting that's available, which is LED lighting, that starts with a blue light that excites a yellow phosphor. And that's what's right now available at Home Depot, blue light with yellow phosphor. And combined, your eye thinks it's looking at white.

However, it's a very cold white. It's missing the red hues. And so what we've done-- actually, what QD Vision has done, inspired by work done at MIT, is to take the red quantum dots, add it to this blue-yellow light bulb, and take away some of those blue extra photons, excite the red quantum dots. All combined, now you have a little bit less blue, you still have the yellow from the phosphor from before, and now added to that is this beautiful red extra peak, giving you an overall spectrum that looks very much like an incandescent light bulb that uses only about 1/5, 1/6 of the energy. So dramatic energy savings at the same quality of light. And as the LEDs keep going down and down and down in cost, give it a couple of years, and it's going to economically seem a no-brainer to invest in LEDs, as opposed to even fluorescent light bulbs that happen to be issues with mercury disposal, packaging, and so forth.

INTERVIEWER: While we're on the spin-off company area and the tough science, your one other spin-off company you have, Kateeva, I have read focuses on the development of printed organic electronics.

BULOVIC: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: Now, to me this sounds like an all-cotton iPod.

[LAUGHTER]

BULOVIC: Exactly. I don't know how you knew that. That's exactly it.

INTERVIEWER: So I'm guessing it's not that. But I was wondering if you could explain what it is.

BULOVIC: Sure, it's an all-cotton--

[LAUGHTER]

BULOVIC: For my graduate work, I worked on organic LEDs, as I mentioned earlier. And all those are are, again, those electrified pickles sliced really thin. In this case, though, you use organic molecules to give you the glow. I mentioned before, the nanometer-scale items that can be optically or electrically excited. The organic LEDs make beautiful displays. And there are demonstrations. Companies like Sony, Samsung, LG have demonstrated 11-, 15-, 17-inch displays. The only little problem with them is that the cost may be 10 times more than conventional screens.

As a matter of fact, you look at the screen and you say, this is so simple, how can it cost so much? I mean, the only thing you have is a piece of glass, some electrodes, a little bit of electronics, and then just this film of molecules and the top electrode, and you're done. It should cost a lot less than a liquid crystal display, which is the standard today, which has, on top of everything, polarizers, liquid crystal that's liquid, these rotating plates-- I mean, just a whole bunch of color, just a whole bunch of things. Yet it's cheaper still today to make liquid crystal displays, because technology has been around for about 20 years in commercial use for really good ones.

OLEDs, organic LEDs, invented about 20, 25 years ago, but commercially really available only for a few years. And so you look at the big Achilles heel of that technology and it's patterning, being able to actually give a very well-defined pattern of particular molecules with a well-defined thickness over extremely large areas. And the reason for it is that, in my OLED, my whole OLED, the entire device consists only of 100 molecules in thickness. To kind of get you a sense, it's 0.1 microns, which is 1/1,000 of a thickness of your hair, roughly.

So take your hair, slice it 1,000 times lengthwise, that's the thickness of the whole OLED screen. So you can put it on anything you want. But out of those 100 molecules, it's the middle 10 molecules that are glowing. So if I'm going to give you a technology that's going to make TV displays made of OLEDs, I'm going to give you a technology that's able to put down accurately with a 10-molecule accuracy films of molecules over very large areas. That's a big challenge in the organic led manufacturing industry.

And then, on top of that, I would like to have molecules that glow red over here. 20 microns away, I would like to have molecules that glow green. And then 20 microns away, the blue ones, and then repeat that over and over again. And you know what else? I do not want any of my pixels that make my TV screen to look bad. I want all of them to work exactly right. As a matter of fact, all the three million pixels and subpixels, every single one better be absolutely perfect for me to buy your display.

That's a very tall order, because if I'm going to give you any electronic technology-- I'm going to give you a Intel Pentium chip. There are plenty of really bad transistors in that Pentium chip, but there are redundant circuits that make sure that, in a case there is a misdoing of one of the transistors inside that billion-element chip, there are other circuits that pick up the slack and work, compensate for the error. Or you can give me a solar cell. You look at a solar cell, light gets absorbed. You don't know that sections of that solar cell don't work very well.

But stuff you stare at, displays, you're looking at every element I made. And so what Kateeva has, it has likely a solution to this really challenging problem on how to print organic electronics in general, specifically thin films for organic displays, over very large areas as needed. You can think of it almost like making a saddle plotter for, in this case, not just posters, but for electronics.

INTERVIEWER: I'm sorry, a saddle poster?

BULOVIC: Saddle plotter. So if you look at the inkjet printers, they print 8 and 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper. But whenever we make posters, we go to this thing that's called saddle plotter. And what it is, it's an inkjet printer that's this wide and this narrow, so it looks like a saddle. And you feed a very large sheet of paper through it, and you print the whole poster that's now 2 by 4 feet, or 6 by 10 feet, however big you want to make it.

So inkjet printing over that large area is now doable. So we are thinking that's just optics. Can I give you an inkjet printer that prints electronics? And so the tools that Kateeva is making are indeed very large. They can handle 2 meter by 2 meter pieces of glass, if you want, which is as tall as me and as wide as me. So in that sense, it can generate an ability to deploy electronics on nearly any surface in a format that might be desirable by simply on-the-fly programming at how you want to make it.

INTERVIEWER: So that would radically drive down the cost of the LED television screens.

BULOVIC: Absolutely, but--

INTERVIEWER: They'd be everywhere. Will we have that Minority Report future where screens are everywhere?

BULOVIC: A Minority Report future is today. We have stuff like that in the lab. Before Minority Report was filmed, we had the transparent and flexible displays. And then one day, I was visiting UDC, Universal Display Corporation, a company that got started on organic LED research back when I was a graduate student. And we heard that the crew from the next Tom Cruise movie was coming to talk to us. So they did. I did not know which movie it is. The next thing I knew, that next year Minority Report came out, and they had ideas that were very similar to what we were talking about back in the late '90s, which was transparent displays and flexible displays and light-emitting surfaces. So, nifty.

INTERVIEWER: It is nifty. As we're talking, I'm thinking about a statement you made, that we live our lives at the nanoscale. And I get a little of what you mean, but I'm a little confused. When I get up in the morning and I drink my cup of coffee, I'm living at the 12-ounce scale, at the eight-ounce scale.

[LAUGHTER]

INTERVIEWER: I think. Aren't I?

BULOVIC: Well, it's a fantastic question. I mean, I think we are creatures who consume macro quantities of nanoscale. It is indeed the way that the water dresses the insides of your body, but those water molecules, the way they interact with the insides of your body that makes a difference for the way our neurons fire, or makes a difference for the way that the digestive system works. It is leaching of ions from our bones into our system that controls the firing of our neurons. And I know very little about biology, but I do appreciate the fact that it's the ion channels that make a difference.

And all that ion channels do is let sodium or potassium go in and out, and that change causes a change in potential. That little change in potential causes our neurons to spaz. And that spazzing of the neurons sends a signal, an electrical signal, to our brain. And our brain says, whenever that particular neuron is spazzing, I must be looking at a green light at that section of my eye. And these million signals come to the eye, and then we see an image, because those signals were then translated to spazzing.

So at the end, I need to ask, what happens when that single photon hits that single molecule inside my eye and opens up that ion channel that's made of not single molecule but maybe four molecules? But it's that nanoscale that, at the end, that will govern the way that I will respond. And yes, I am experiencing macroscopic nanoscale response all at once. And yes, it's incredible that our brain is able to go ahead and manage all this input all at once. I marvel at the fact that I can ignore the fact that my jacket and my shirt are touching my body as I'm speaking to you. But it's happening all the time. I'm sensing all those things, except my brain knows to just focus on this one thing, looking at you and talking to you and tune out all the other parts.

So we always deal with macroscopic amounts of information, but at the end, the way it's translated to us is via a nanoscopic-type event. And an appreciation of a nanoscopic-type event will allow me to understand how to modify, how to make it look different, how to make it appear different.

INTERVIEWER: So do you have moments when you're walking down the street that the world is like seeing the Matrix? You suddenly see things in nano form?

[LAUGHTER]

BULOVIC: No.

INTERVIEWER: Or imagine it to be so? Would you like to?

BULOVIC: Well, I guess the only thing I ever done is try to understand the world around me. So I teach a class, 6.007. It's electromagnetic energy from motors to lasers. And it was a fantastic learning experience. A colleague of mine, Rajeev Ram, co-developed it with me, and Rajeev taught me an amazing amount of stuff in the process. But the challenge to us was to try to relate to a student in the course of a semester everything that we might experience in the process of living our life.

Now, both of us are electrical engineers, and we wanted to essentially give you applied electromagnetics, but not by telling you Maxwell's equations and by telling you this is how you go about solving the cylindrical coordinates. That's not real. I mean, it's real, but it's not real from the perspective of actually seeing an iPhone and saying, everything in this iPhone is electrical engineering, every single bit of it. I mean, I'm going to show you how the antennas work. I'll show you how the display works. I'll show you how the microphone is made. I'll show you how the accelerometer works, figure out how the picture twists around when you turn the phone around. I'll show you how to make a battery. I'll go ahead and then connect it to the whole system and tell you how the two communicate.

That's what matters at the end. And so your Wii controller now that you swing around to play your game, you realize that, oh, that has an accelerometer. And all the darn accelerometer is is just a little piece of silicon that has a little spring on it that happens to move left and right and change the capacitance between the left contact and right contact as it's swung back and forth, which is interpreted as me moving my hand. We spend time talking about, again, everything from motors to lasers, so there is launching of magnets, there is liquid crystal displays, there is tunneling in touch scans.

So I find that as you tell the story of the class-- and the class is taught in 50 stories. We have 50 lectures. And it's fairly rigorous. At the end, you need to understand both electricity and magnetism, electrostatics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics, all in the same work.

But at the end of that, you realize that, I needed to spend a class talking about how we see. And the fact that, if I'm going to trick you into seeing yellow, there's no yellow pixel on my TV display, so how come my TV can make a yellow image? Well, it's the way our brain works, so you have to explain that. Or how do I make a 3D image when I go to that movie theater? Oh, well, all you need is a polarization rotator, a quarter-wave plate, a polarizer, and go ahead and do a different polarization for left and right, circular polarized light for the left and right right.