James Tour
speaker
1,512 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 15 Dec
James Tour’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
out of plastic and wires and silicon rather than molecules.
I mean, every time you want to build something, what do you do?
You look at something that already does that and you mimic it.
Well, why don't we build our robots out of molecules, out of polysaccharides and polypeptides and lipids and nucleic acids?
Why don't we build?
Because that's what's demonstrated to us in nature.
We would just copy it.
Because we haven't the idea.
It's so hard to think about how you're going to build something out of molecules.
So what do you do?
You build it out of plastic.
You build it out of silicon.
I mean, these basic four classes of components.
And I'm like, God, how do you do this?
This is what, I mean, it gives me much more appreciation for God.
When I see this as a scientist, who has this understanding that I have?
Nobody.
I mean, I look at a tree.
I see a leaf.
And I know why it's green, and I know that there's a magnesium atom sitting in the middle of a porphyrin, and photons are funneled, light is funneled into that magnesium atom.
Showing 41–60 of 1,512 · page 3 of 76
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