Things get strange at small levels. Tiny levels. Micro levels. Nano levels. Gold can turn to liquid at room temperature. Copper goes transparent. Inert elements turn reactive. Aluminum becomes combustible. The familiar becomes wondrous and unpredictable.

Ivan Schuller, who is giving tonight’s Pinhead Town Talk, is also a bit wondrous and unpredictable.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Schuller spends his days negotiating the intricate world of nanotechnology. He can tell you about thin films and superlattices, about vortices and nanopores. His papers appear in the Journal of Superconductivity and Hyperfine Interactions.

But he’s also a comedian and playwright, actor and producer. Go to his Web site, and there he is, an impish grin on his face, starring in a science video where peanuts rain onto a baseball stadium and an actor plucks hairs from Schuller’s beard.

His talk tonight at the Conference Center in Mountain Village is a double-green tour of nanoscience. It’s called “When things get small: the magical world of nanoscience,” and runs from 6 p.m. to 7:15 p.m. Admission is free.

“I’m not going to talk about the details of everything,” Schuller said. “I’m not going to give you a shopping list.”

He’ll hit three major points. One: nobody knows what new technologies will evolve from a particular strain of science. Two: substances and chemicals start behaving strangely — almost magically — when you shrink down and glimpse them on a nano scale. And three: nanoscience may yet yield some fantastic applications.

Schuller usually deploys a bag of props to help audiences conceptualize his ideas, but he said they got lost on the flight to Telluride.

“They are sort of in United jail,” he said. “I’m not sure they will arrive on time.”

Nanobots and nanotechnology has been touted as the wave of the future for revolutionizing the way we understand and approach medicine, cancer detection, water filtration, computing, pollution and more.

Decades ago, physicist Richard Feynman rhapsodized about the possibilities, saying, “I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously ... The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.

”Nanoscience works on vanishingly small scales. A nanometer is about a billionth of a meter long, and scientists working in the field are usually dealing with molecules and devices between 1 and 100 nanometers long. A single human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick.

Schuller’s work takes him onto the far edges of possibility, toward developing sub-microscopic technology that, one day, could detect explosives or pinpoint whether someone had even the earliest presence of breast cancer cells in her body.

But those days are likely far off. Already, some nanoparticles have been employed in sunscreens, cosmetics and paints, or as catalysts in fuel. But so far, man-made nanoparticles are not racing around our bodies, destroying tumors and slowing the aging process.

Schuller said that, sometimes, people don’t understand the complexity and uncertainty of the research and lines of thought and experimentation that go towards pursuing new technology. Especially at such incomprehensibly small scales.

“People want to know, when am I going to cure cancer,” he said. “There is no question whatever that the totality of this research will give something. Which of the research will give something? If I knew, I’d have invested in it.”

For more information, call Nana Naisbitt at 970-708-0004.