Greeting Words

Professor Dr. Helmuth Möhwald

“For me, nanotechnology is a technology based on the defined structure control in the size range between 1 nm and 100 nm. This also includes technologies based on the more classical fields of colloid or interface research, so nanotechnology is nothing new, since these areas have been used for almost 100 years. But perhaps the defined structural control is younger, but certainly older than the many words with the prefix NANO.”

Professor Dr. Helmuth Möhwald * January 19, 1946; † March 27, 2018, Director, Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces.

 

Professor Dr. Gerd Binnig

“Processes in the nanometer range are actually almost omnipresent, in the processes in our organism, even when painting a slatted fence. But today, when we talk about nanotechnology, we do not mean chemical processes, even if they take place on the finest scale. We mean the targeted nanometer-precise local design of an object that fulfils a function. However, the transition from chemistry via biology to nanotechnology is smooth, as the transition from statistical to targeted processes is smooth, and relative local design can be just as important as absolute design. A transistor does not necessarily have to be absolutely positioned to the chip if only its connections go to the right places and it fits into its immediate vicinity. Perhaps the transistors only have to function statistically in a certain sense if the overall function is still selected.”

Professor Dr. Gerd Binnig * July 20, 1947 in Frankfurt am Main, IBM Fellow, Nobel Prize in Physics 1986.