The Long Patience

In 2006 I was sitting in a classroom in Venice. The professor was teaching semiconductor device physics — standard material, MOSFETs, threshold voltage, the usual architecture of the field. I had a question. Not a polite clarifying question, but the kind of question that comes from genuinely not accepting the premise: why are we building switches out of materials that fight us? Silicon is a mediocre conductor. We spend enormous effort doping it, gating it, coaxing charge carriers to move where we want them. We are fighting the natural tendency of the material at every step.

I had been reading about carbon nanotubes. A metallic armchair nanotube carries current ballistically — without scattering, without resistance in the classical sense, at room temperature. It does not need to be doped. It does not need a gate voltage to overcome a bandgap. It is already a conductor; the question is only how to switch it. The natural tendency of the material is conductance. You are working with the physics, not against it.

I raised this in class. The response was polite and dismissive in the way that academic responses often are when a student raises something that would require too much restructuring to engage with seriously: yes, interesting, but fabrication challenges, but integration challenges, but the industry is committed to silicon scaling, but.

I sat with it for twenty years.

What Waiting Is Not

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this story that is self-flattering in a way I want to avoid. The version where the lone visionary is dismissed by the establishment, persists through adversity, and is eventually vindicated. That version is almost always a retrospective construction. In the moment, it rarely feels like noble persistence. It usually feels like uncertainty.

The honest account of the twenty years is that I did not spend them all working on carbon nanotubes. I had a career. I worked on other problems. I built other things. The nanotube question went into a background queue — not abandoned, but not actively pursued. There were months, and sometimes years, when I did not think about it seriously.

What I want to distinguish is the difference between waiting and forgetting. An idea can be patient without its holder being patient. The idea sits somewhere in the mind at a level below active attention, and occasionally it resurfaces — when you read something adjacent, when a different problem reminds you of the structure, when a tool becomes available that wasn’t available before. You find yourself thinking about it again without quite deciding to. The idea does its own waiting.

This is not the same as procrastination, though from the outside it may look similar. Procrastination is avoidance of something you believe you should be doing. This was something different: a recognition, mostly unconscious, that the time was not yet right — not because the idea was wrong, but because the tools to prove it were not yet in my hands.

The Tool That Wasn’t There

In 2006, running a quantum transport simulation of a double-walled carbon nanotube at the level of detail required to show trit encoding was not practically feasible for someone without access to a major supercomputing facility. The NEGF formalism — Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function — was established, but the computational cost of applying it to a realistic two-tube system was prohibitive.

By 2025, I had a workstation with two AMD Radeon Pro W7900 GPUs, 96 GB of VRAM, and an EPYC processor with 32 cores. I had ROCm, I had Kwant, I had Python libraries that would have been graduate-student research projects in 2006. The same calculation that would have required months on a university cluster — if I had had access to one — could run overnight on hardware I owned.

The idea had not changed. The physics had not changed. What had changed was that I could now check whether I was right.

This is the thing about waiting for a tool: you don’t know you’re waiting for it until it arrives. The wait does not feel like anticipation. It feels like an open question that has not yet resolved. And then one day the resolution is suddenly possible, and the question that has been sitting in the background for years becomes urgent and immediate and answerable.

The Weight of an Unproven Idea

There is something I want to say about what it is like to carry an idea you cannot yet prove.

It is not heroic. It is not romantic. It is uncomfortable in a specific way that is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it. The idea does not feel like a possession. It feels more like a debt — something you owe an account of, something that requires justification you cannot yet provide. When you tell someone about it and they are skeptical, the skepticism lands differently than it would if you had the proof in hand. You cannot yet answer the question “but does it work?” and that inability sits with you.

At the same time, the idea has a quality that pure fantasy does not. It is grounded in physics you can check. The mechanism is real — ballistic transport in metallic CNTs is experimentally confirmed. The MWCNT modulation of SWCNT conductance is a real phenomenon. The AC symmetry I(+V) = −I(−V) follows from time-reversal symmetry of the Hamiltonian. None of these are speculation. The only unproven step was the combination: would the specific configuration I envisioned produce the specific trit encoding I needed?

That specific question was what I could not answer without the simulation. And that specific question is what kept the idea from crossing over from hypothesis to claim.

The weight of an unproven idea is the weight of knowing you might be wrong. Not certainly wrong — the physics arguments were too strong for that — but possibly wrong in the specific configuration, possibly miscalculating the magnitude of the effect, possibly discovering that some competing mechanism I had not modeled would dominate and erase the signal. This is the honest state of any idea before it has been tested: probably right, possibly wrong, not yet known.

What keeps you with it, in that state, is not certainty. It is something closer to structural conviction — the belief that the argument has the right shape, even if you cannot yet trace every contour.

On the Value of the Wait

I am sometimes asked, usually by younger engineers, whether I regret not pursuing this earlier. The question assumes that earlier would have been better. I am not sure that is true.

In 2006, I did not have the simulation tools. But more importantly, I did not have the full architecture. The idea in 2006 was about the device — the nanotube switch. The idea in 2026 is about an entire computing stack: device, logic, processor, memory, security, software, operating system, compiler, programming language. Six patents. The device is the first layer of something much larger.

I do not think I could have seen the full stack in 2006. I had not yet spent twenty years thinking about what a computing paradigm built on these physical principles would actually look like at every level. The wait was not only for the tools. It was also for the problem to become clear enough to be worth solving completely.

There is a kind of understanding that only comes from carrying a question for a long time. The question turns over in your mind in idle moments. You see it from angles you did not know existed when you first posed it. Connections appear that would not have been visible earlier — not because you were smarter, but because you had more surface area to connect things to. The twenty years were not lost time. They were the time the question needed to become the question it actually was.

The Patience That Is Not Yours

One more thing, and then I will stop.

The patience was not entirely mine. My family was patient. Nashik was patient — the city, the Godavari, the rhythms of a life that was not organized around this project even when the project was growing in the background. The patience of ordinary life — meals, seasons, responsibilities, the daily work of being a person in a place — is what makes the long patience of an idea possible. You cannot carry an unproven idea for twenty years on pure willpower. You carry it because the rest of your life is stable enough to hold it.

I am grateful for that stability. And for the fact that on April 2, 2026, when I finally had the answer, I had people to tell.