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It's an electrical network, isn't it? It's molecules in space... and they're linked to each other electrically. Which is to say, one end of a soap molecule is attracted to a nearby water molecule electrically. The bubble is this network. The whole thing is inter-dependent.
My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.
There's a preponderance of scientists and engineers among China's rulers. New President Xi Jinping was trained as a chemical engineer. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, earned a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, held a degree in electrical engineering.
For me, as a woman in one of the less diverse fields - electrical engineering, which is what I studied in college - it was hard to persist and really build a career. Some of the things I experienced were really scary, and they weren't experiences that I wanted for my daughter.
Few would look at a concrete highway system or an electrical grid and perceive agency in their static arrangement, spaces and urban arrangements are usually treated as collections of objects or volumes, not as actors. Yet the organization itself is active. It is doing something.
Colleges will try to get the good students. That's the way to go. When I chaired my department of Materials Engineering at the Technion in 1990, we started a program for which we set the bar very high. It was the highest at the Technion, above electrical engineering and medicine.
I remember when I drove into Notre Dame, getting ready for the first day of work. I had an electrical charge go up my back because I realized all of a sudden that I was responsible for the traditions that the Knute Rocknes and the Frank Leahys had set, and what Notre Dame stood for.
There are a number of things that can cause your fridge to break down or lose power: electrical shorts or surges, clogged ventilation, et cetera. So it's possible that even with your temperature dial adjusted to the correct position, your fridge might be far warmer than it should be.
In order to produce learned fear, you take a neutral stimulus like a tone, and you pair it with an electrical shock. Tone, shock. Tone, shock. So the animal learns that the tone is bad news. But you can also do the opposite - shock it at other times, but never when the tone comes on.
My mum brought me to my first job when I was 12. I started electrical work at her plant. She was an engineer, a technical expert, at one of the plants in the south, and in the summer she brought me in and I learnt how industrial things work: casting, electricity, maintenance, everything.
My dad is an electrical engineer. So he was always very focused on, you know, teaching his daughters about, you know, science, math, technology. None of us actually became engineers for our careers, but I always had that exposure when I was young, and I just loved playing computer games.
I always knew I wanted to be a technologist, so I went to Duke and got a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Really, I thought my goal in life was to be an inventor, a problem solver, so I thought I needed a Ph.D. to be good at inventions, but it turns out that you don't.
I had originally wanted to be a lawyer. Even when I went to college and majored in engineering, I still thought I'd get a law degree. Then I started taking electrical engineering classes where I saw some of the innovation happening around computers and solid-state technology in the mid '80s.
I hope climate science becomes the big thing. And then what I want is electrical engineers to solve the world's energy problems, energy distribution problems. I want mechanical engineers to make better transportation systems. I want chemical engineers to develop better solar panels, and so on.
'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way.
Civil engineers build bridges. Electrical engineers, power grids. Software engineers, apps. From the engineers who created the Great Pyramids to the engineers who are designing and developing tomorrow's autonomous vehicles, these visionaries and their tangible creations are inextricably linked.
I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton.
Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.
My dad owns a company that lends equipment to industrial projects. I've been obsessed with taking it over since I could talk. I'd follow him and repeat conversations about how many tons of cranes were arriving. He said it was a man's world, so I studied electrical engineering because it was related.
For my Ph.D. thesis, I was measuring the electrical activity that triggers light emission from a bioluminescent dinoflagellate. As I was nearing the completion of my degree, my major professor wrote a grant for an instrument for measuring the color of very dim light flashes from bioluminescent animals.
I was studying at Stanford University with two quarters left to go before receiving an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. Then, I got the telephone call from my mother. I had no choice. I went home, and I jumped into the company feet first, right from day one. There was no time to grieve my father.
A sense of electrical current was part of my own experience of being manic. The sensation that my mind was spinning and overheating would sometimes build to a sensation like an electrical short - a burst of light, a melting, or dissipating - and I'd get a metallic taste in my mouth, like when you lick a battery.
It was close to like a 67- or 70-day shoot for 'Tron' on stage, in the suit. You can't even sit down during the day because of all the cables that divide the foam rubber and all the electrical circuits. We had these stools that were tall with a bicycle seat on them and you're just looking at a blue screen all day.
My father was an electrical contractor, while I used to deliver video cassettes on a cycle to people in Juhu and Bandra, including celebrities like Mithun Chakraborty. Mithunda remembers me and is very proud of me. He can't believe that the guy who used to come to his house in short pants has become so successful.
My mom's brother was gay, and he actually passed away from AIDS when I was 13. He was quite a character, but he also worked at the electrical plant, so he was this complicated guy with a big laugh who would wear a trucker hat and do impressions. He was gay, but to me, Uncle Alan was just the funniest person in the world.
Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
I loved school, was an exceptional student, and found a passion for math and science that led me to Vanderbilt University, where I discovered the world of electrical engineering. I did well in college, loved the work I was doing, and soon found myself climbing the corporate ladder after graduation. I was one of the lucky ones.
I was walking home from school when I was about 17 with two friends, and they took a left into an electrical shop. While we were chatting away, they grabbed a couple of forms and I was handed one. My mum found it and made me fill it in. I got called for an interview, and that's how I ended up being an electrician for 11 years.
And so when I moved to IBM, I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn't actually have to do my engineer - I was an electrical engineer, but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there, though, I have to say, at the time, I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not.