decade, but he still had the no-nonsense attitude of a soldier.
“Isaac Newton was the tipping point—a solitary man standing at the transition between the ancient world and the modern. Before Newton, we were a civilization of superstitious craftsmen. We could make plows and crossbows and trebuchets, but our understanding of the world—and our ability to control it—was something that we learned by experience, by trial and error. Or we were guided by ‘experts’ that had a line to a deeper truth. Religious leaders. Shamans. People who spent their lives waiting for the gods to reveal the mysterious forces at work in the universe. But no more. After Newton, you just sat down with pencil and paper and worked it all out. No magic. No mumbo jumbo. And no special training required, except a decent knowledge of mathematics.”
Jake had taught this course three semesters in a row, a record for him in the eight years he’d been at Cornell. He typically switched teaching assignments as often as he could, preferring to wander the entire curriculum instead of digging deeper and deeper into the same hole. But he loved this course. His colleagues in other departments made noise about how art, politics, or the pen was a hammer to shape the world, but in Jake’s estimation, technology was the biggest hammer out there.
Jake continued. “People wasted little time putting Newton’s laws, and those of Maxwell, Einstein, and Schrödinger, to productive use. And since we had laws for everything, no matter how big or small, they allowed us to move beyond everyday human scales. The first great push was toward the ever bigger: mighty dams, great oceangoing vessels, and—perhaps the high-water mark of the big—venturing to the moon. Now we are in a second revolution. Question: what is it?”
The students looked bored. Their indifference surprised him. The discovery that the natural world was mathematically explicable was, to Jake, the single most significant development in the history of humanity. From this followed the obvious consequence: the world was controllable. The constituents of the world—radio waves, apples, or planets—did what the differential equations told them to do. You learn to perform some formal manipulations of symbols on a page, and the next thing you know, you’re building radios that can communicate across oceans, or launching projectiles at your enemies with a precision that was terrifying to behold. It was that simple.
“What is it?” he repeated. “No guesses?”
“Nano,” came an answer from the front.
“You got it. Nano. The realm of the ultrasmall. Small has replaced big as the terra incognita for techno-explorers. The nanoworld is the new frontier.”
Jake clicked an icon on his computer and a color photo of an Intel Core 2 Quad processor chip appeared on the ten-foot-tall screen behind him. “A modern integrated circuit is the most complex and sophisticated piece of technology ever made,” Jake said. He clicked again, and the view zoomed onto a single transistor within the circuit. “This transistor is a thousand times narrower than a human hair. It is as much smaller than you as the earth is bigger than you. Distances in this world are measured in nanometers. Nano—from the Greek nanos , meaning ‘little old man,’ indicating one billionth. That’s small. One billionth of the population of the earth wouldn’t even fill up the front row of this class.
“The power of nano makes it possible to construct an entire world in the space of a meter,” Jake continued, as the image on the screen zoomed back out, the single transistor quickly lost in the rectangular maze of transistors, capacitors, and copper interconnects. “This computer chip is a world of doors and passageways for electrons, guiding them in a dance as intricate and involved as the daily movements of millions of people in any major city. An entire city for electrons can be built in a space smaller than a postage stamp.”
“Isaac Newton was the tipping point—a solitary man standing at the transition between the ancient world and the modern. Before Newton, we were a civilization of superstitious craftsmen. We could make plows and crossbows and trebuchets, but our understanding of the world—and our ability to control it—was something that we learned by experience, by trial and error. Or we were guided by ‘experts’ that had a line to a deeper truth. Religious leaders. Shamans. People who spent their lives waiting for the gods to reveal the mysterious forces at work in the universe. But no more. After Newton, you just sat down with pencil and paper and worked it all out. No magic. No mumbo jumbo. And no special training required, except a decent knowledge of mathematics.”
Jake had taught this course three semesters in a row, a record for him in the eight years he’d been at Cornell. He typically switched teaching assignments as often as he could, preferring to wander the entire curriculum instead of digging deeper and deeper into the same hole. But he loved this course. His colleagues in other departments made noise about how art, politics, or the pen was a hammer to shape the world, but in Jake’s estimation, technology was the biggest hammer out there.
Jake continued. “People wasted little time putting Newton’s laws, and those of Maxwell, Einstein, and Schrödinger, to productive use. And since we had laws for everything, no matter how big or small, they allowed us to move beyond everyday human scales. The first great push was toward the ever bigger: mighty dams, great oceangoing vessels, and—perhaps the high-water mark of the big—venturing to the moon. Now we are in a second revolution. Question: what is it?”
The students looked bored. Their indifference surprised him. The discovery that the natural world was mathematically explicable was, to Jake, the single most significant development in the history of humanity. From this followed the obvious consequence: the world was controllable. The constituents of the world—radio waves, apples, or planets—did what the differential equations told them to do. You learn to perform some formal manipulations of symbols on a page, and the next thing you know, you’re building radios that can communicate across oceans, or launching projectiles at your enemies with a precision that was terrifying to behold. It was that simple.
“What is it?” he repeated. “No guesses?”
“Nano,” came an answer from the front.
“You got it. Nano. The realm of the ultrasmall. Small has replaced big as the terra incognita for techno-explorers. The nanoworld is the new frontier.”
Jake clicked an icon on his computer and a color photo of an Intel Core 2 Quad processor chip appeared on the ten-foot-tall screen behind him. “A modern integrated circuit is the most complex and sophisticated piece of technology ever made,” Jake said. He clicked again, and the view zoomed onto a single transistor within the circuit. “This transistor is a thousand times narrower than a human hair. It is as much smaller than you as the earth is bigger than you. Distances in this world are measured in nanometers. Nano—from the Greek nanos , meaning ‘little old man,’ indicating one billionth. That’s small. One billionth of the population of the earth wouldn’t even fill up the front row of this class.
“The power of nano makes it possible to construct an entire world in the space of a meter,” Jake continued, as the image on the screen zoomed back out, the single transistor quickly lost in the rectangular maze of transistors, capacitors, and copper interconnects. “This computer chip is a world of doors and passageways for electrons, guiding them in a dance as intricate and involved as the daily movements of millions of people in any major city. An entire city for electrons can be built in a space smaller than a postage stamp.”
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