We all like to dream about “what could be.” As chemists who make materials, this often takes the form of drawing pictures of what we want, based on our predictions of what the material might do. The challenge then becomes actually making what we designed. We can now design, and then actually make, a large megalibrary of nanoparticles with previously unimaginable complexity, all using simple benchtop chemistry and standard laboratory glassware. This begins to shift the narrative from “what is possible to make” to “what do we want to make.”
