Every Friday afternoon at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA, R. Stanley Williams, one of the most respected thinkers in the field of molecular electronics, gets his group of 25 research scientists together to talk shop. One by one, they make their way to the conference room. Williams walks in exactly on time, sits down in front, and leans back, frowning, his hands steepled. He was hired by HP in 1995 to rethink the basics of computing and has handpicked the team inside this room to do just that. Williams likes to wear jeans, and his hair reaches halfway down his back, so he gives a first, fleeting impression of quietude and informality. But he apparently never smiles, and his people work 19-hour days to meet his deadlines. Williams waits a few minutes for the habitual latecomers, then stands up. He speaks in an efficient monotone.

"We're going to hear first from Gun-Young today," he says. "What he has accomplished is magnificent. Everyone here owes him a lunch because his hard work has paid for our salaries for the last several months."

Gun-Young Jung, a recent postdoc from South Korea, stands up and quietly describes his work on nano imprint lithography, a process that uses a physical mold to create features as small as six nanometers across on silicon wafers. That's more than an order of magnitude smaller than the finest features achievable using today's advanced photo-lithographic processes. Sometimes things stick to the mold, though. It's like cake batter sticking to a pan, he says. His presentation lasts about ten minutes and is followed by two others.

Listening to these speakers, one after another, gradually conveys a sense of the group's style. They enjoy self-deprecating humor and inject frequent expressions of bewilderment into their scientific explanations, like "I don't know" and "it's still a mystery" and "I still need to investigate," and even "I am still quite a novice." And despite their obvious expertise, this isn't false modesty.