Andrew Briggs
Andrew Briggs is the inaugural chair in nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his early work using acoustic microscopy to solve problems in materials science and for more recent work developing materials and techniques for quantum technologies. His laboratory studies single-molecule devices for low-energy information and communication technologies and for simulating quantum processes in biology. He recently published The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions, with coauthor Roger Wagner.
Professor Briggs delivered the Eugene Wigner Distinguished Lecture March 8, 2016, on the topic “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Curiosity.” We asked him about his book, single-molecule devices and the relationship between fundamental and applied research.
1. How do explorations of fundamental science and applied technology reinforce one another?
The relationship between fundamental science and applied technology is a subtle and fascinating one. It never ceases to amaze me how time and again, when you investigate something just because you’re curious about it and you want to understand it, it may turn out to be useful and significant for technology. And, conversely, sometimes when you’re trying to solve a technological problem, you learn all sorts of fundamental things that are absolutely fascinating. Materials science is a very good example of that, because much of materials science has been driven by technological need—I’m sorry to say sometimes by warfare needs—and it’s led to fascinating understanding of what stuff is made of and what makes stuff strong, or malleable, or suitable for the particular purpose you want to use it.
Conversely, time and again when people have studied fundamental properties, just because they wanted to understand it, it’s turned out to produce materials that may be suitable for applications that they may not have had in mind at all when they undertook the original research.
2. Tells us about your book, The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions?
The book was published last week in the U.K. It’s about to be published in the USA. It’s called “The Penultimate Curiosity,” and the subtitle really tells you what it’s about: It’s about how science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions. I wrote it with an artist, Roger Wagner, and he and I have been talking about and thinking about these things more than 16 years now. What we’re basically exploring in the book is the way that, time and again, when you’ve had a culture or community—or occasionally it can just be an individual—who’s been interested in ultimate questions. Questions about meaning and purpose and value and beauty and God and belief and whatever really mattered to them at an ultimate level, which may have lain beyond the rim of the material world. Time and again, that has led to significant advances in what we would now think of as science. You have to be careful not to use categories of religion and science in times when they didn’t really apply in the sense of their modern meanings. But nevertheless, where people have been asking these big questions, what we now think of as science has, as it were, swum in the slipstream that’s been created by the curiosity about these ultimate questions.
3. In your research you also study single-molecule devices. What are single-molecule devices, and how can they be useful?
A single-molecule device is an electrical device where the active element is one single molecule. The breakthrough in the last few years that’s made it possible to have reproducible and stable single-molecule devices is to use, for the contacts, a nanoribbon of graphene in which we have a method that we’ve patented of creating a gap that’s about one molecule wide. And then we take a molecule that’s got the properties of interest, and we attach to it two anchor groups—they’re sort of like sticky Post-it notes that stick to the two side of the graphene—and then we can control and investigate how current flows through this device. And we’re particularly interested in cases where there are significant quantum phenomena—of quantum interference or quantum resonance—that first of all enable us to study these things, so it’s sort of completing the spectroscopy of molecules, because we’re now looking at how charge can flow through, and in particular how it can flow through multiple pathways and get interferences between them. Once we understand these things, it may provide the basis for some really important technologies—technologies to make transistors that have significantly lower power consumption than current transistors, ways of harvesting heat to make electricity from temperature differences between two places, and even possibly for further-on applications like machine learning, possibly even genome sequencing as well.
4. Why was it important to visit ORNL, meet with researchers here, and participate in the Wigner Lecture Series?
It’s been hugely enjoyable visiting Oak Ridge National Lab. I’ve been made to feel so welcome. And I’ve met such delightful and such very stimulating people. As far as the lecture goes, it’s a real privilege to be able to share some of the things that have become important to me in my own research career and my thinking. And I hope it may be a stimulus to some of the researchers here, perhaps some of the researchers at an earlier stage of their career. I specifically gave the title of “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Curiosity,” and I hope it will give them not only permission but also encouragement to be curious in their work and in their lives. I’ve made contact with a number of scientists on very specific projects where I hope we may be able to establish collaborations. And we’re also talking about the possibility of a larger effort to develop materials for low-energy-consumption information and communication technologies, to tackle the ballooning consumption of electricity by computers and other related technologies. And it may be that this may become part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s vision, perhaps in communication with the U.S. government, but I hope more widely, so that there might become a U.S. national, but maybe even a global, effort to develop materials that have the potential to reduce the electricity consumption of computing and related technologies.