Question: pv282eura48: How do you decide to make these smart phones and memory?

Kerry O'Shea answered on 10 Nov 2014:

Great question! Since I’m a physicist, I don’t make the smart phones or memory devices directly. My job is to understand how the materials inside them behave as they get smaller and smaller.
If you think about making a simple bridge with a plank of wood, it would be pretty stable and you could walk across it. If we suddenly make that plank of wood the same thickness as a piece of paper, then it wouldn’t be very strong at all. It’s a similar concept to my work – the materials I study are very different as they get thinner. Sometimes they are only a few atoms wide, and it is very important to understand them at such small scales.