There's a wonderful moment that happens at science forums, and it happened again this week in Shanghai. A Nobel Prize winner stands up in front of a room full of students and tells them, more or less: don't play it safe. That's the message chemist Benjamin List delivered at a Shanghai forum on Monday, and let me tell you, it's the kind of advice I wish more young people got to hear in person.

List, who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, encouraged students to pursue revolutionary breakthroughs rather than settling for incremental improvements, according to China Daily's coverage of the event. His prize-winning work was in chemistry, and while the source coverage doesn't get into the technical details, the Nobel committee's recognition speaks for itself. Foundational discoveries like his tend to quietly touch everyday life years down the road, whether or not the rest of us ever learn the chemistry behind them.

What struck me about the message is how countercultural it actually is. The safe path in science, and in tech too, is to refine what already exists. Slightly better battery. Slightly faster chip. Those matter, don't get me wrong. But the truly transformative moments come when someone asks a question everyone else assumed was already answered. I'd like to think that's part of what List meant by revolutionary, though I'll admit that's my interpretation and not something he said on stage.

I've watched this play out across four decades of covering technology. I remember when the smartphone itself seemed like a settled category, just phones with better buttons, and then a touchscreen remake changed everything overnight. Revolutionary thinking isn't reserved for chemistry labs. It's a habit of mind, and it travels well from a lecture hall in Shanghai to a garage in Cupertino.

Forums like this one matter more than people realize. When a Nobel laureate sits down with students, that plants seeds. Some kid in that auditorium may be running a lab in twenty years and remember this afternoon. My granddaughter Jess is still in school, and I tell her the same thing: the people who change things are the ones willing to look silly first. I don't know whether List put it that way, but I suspect he wouldn't object.

Science has always moved forward in this rhythm, long stretches of careful refinement punctuated by leaps that nobody saw coming. And the leaps usually come from the young, or the young at heart, from people who haven't yet learned which questions are considered off-limits. That rhythm isn't a flaw in the system, it's how the system has always worked.

If you want the full account of List's remarks, the reporting from China Daily is worth your time. And to any students reading this who are sitting on an idea that seems too ambitious, too strange, too far outside the lane you've been told to stay in, well. You now have a Nobel laureate telling you to aim for breakthroughs. Take the leap. The refining can come later.