A Very Useful Demonstration Of The Importance Of Sentence Length.

in your opinion, what's going to happen when the physical properties of silicon can't sustain moore's law anymore

nothing, for two reasons

first some background: moore’s law states that every year the number of components (transistors) on integrated circuits will double (due to engineering breakthroughs). it has proved to be somewhat correct. it occurs due to our ability to manufacture smaller and smaller transistors which has a few effects, discussed later. eventually we will hit a point where it no longer matters how small we can print transistors as the fundamental electrical characteristics of silicon break down

in the next couple of years, we will see chips from intel with transistors printed about ten nanometers apart. we approach the limits silicon can handle, theoretically, around ~1nm

in circuits this small, you start seeing tunneling effects which are phenomenons of quantum physics wherein the propagation delay of charge falls to zero, meaning stimulation of the source terminal of a transistor would elicit a response on the drain terminal without any time elapsing. electrons just “blink” from one end of the xsistor to the other. you’d think this would be a good thing, but it isn’t. anyone with advanced physics degrees or deep VLSI knowlege is welcome to chime in why.

anyway

the first reason is there is no alternative to silicon. we have poured billions into researching things like gallium arsenide as a replacement for silicon in integrated circuits. it doesn’t work as well as silicon. people will try to convince you otherwise and those people are crackpots

we have poured a lot of time & money into researching quantum computers and discovered that they are only superior for very specific tasks such as brute-forcing encryption keys and other things of that nature. they will also probably never cost a billion dollars each to manufacture, never need anything less than a power plant and vats of liquid helium to operate, etc etc

the logical “next step” might be optical computing. here, you fundamentally change the hardware paradigm from electrons traveling through traces cut in a mediating silicon substrate between transistors to photons traveling through ?? mediated by ?? between “phototransistors”. the underlying principle is that light, in some cases, travels faster than voltage propagates through conductors. i’m going to get a lot of asks saying “durr kremlin but the speed of light is constant and i took high school physics and blah blah blah” and that’s a discussion worth its own post

this kind of tech is far off. not in our lifetime, not in your children’s lifetime, not in your children’s children’s lifetime

the reason we make transistors smaller is so we can pack them together more closely. this reduces the distance charge must travel in the circuit, making the cycles of these circuits take less time to complete. smaller transistors also generally necessitate less impedance and operate correctly at lower voltages, meaning their operating frequency can increase without a corresponding drop in reliability

these are all nice things, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. how you lay out these transistors is a much more critical and relevant problem. taking a previous VLSI design and shrinking it only works to a point after which you must redesign the layout entirely. intel’s “tick-tock” release/development department follows this model. long before and long after we hit the fundamental limits of silicon, the problem will be laying out our CPU circuits in such a way that we can actually eek out the performance provided by smaller transistors. this is a much, much harder problem to solve than “how do i make the transistor smaller”

the second, more pragmatic reason is that CPUs are fast enough already. there are scarce few problems that can be solved with faster discrete processors that can’t be solved with a million slower ones linked together

the whole tiny-transistor thing is really more of a marketing phenomenon than anything else

Perfect Blue | Satoshi Kon | 1997

I honestly don't mean for this to come across as ignorant or anything like that but I just seen your post about learning kanji's and they're Chinese characters? I didn't know Japanese used Chinese characters? I've only started learning mandarin but I never knew that Japanese used the same characters?

It’s not ignorant at all, please don’t feel that way! Years and years ago in Japan there was no comprehension of such characters, but some Japanese people were sent to China as scholars to basically learn everything about Classical Chinese and due to this there was a sudden (but still rather small) increase in Chinese literacy. It still took a while for Kanji to be fully incorporated into the Japanese language, and even the two other alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are said to be based off of the way in which Chinese was written during this time, in attempt to break down the language barriers between the two nations. Until these alphabets were used the Japanese didn’t have a writing system at all! This means that immigration and visitors from China and Korea in particular have had an influence on the way in which the Japanese language has evolved, and this is most likely why there are some similarities between Japanese and other languages you may study. Chinese and Japanese characters still have particular differences, so somebody who speaks Japanese/Chinese may briefly understand a text based on characters from their original tongue, but in general the strokes are sometimes varied and the pronunciation is completely different so they wouldn’t be able to read it fluently like one might expect (even if the character looks nearly identical.) Sorry if any of my information is wrong- this is just some general knowledge that I’ve picked up from my own research and studies!

If you keep dividing the line segment infinitely you get something really interesting. It is called Cantor Dust. You get an infinite number of points with a total length of zero’ Fathom the Universe

Fabiola Gianotti

Particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti was born on October 29, 1960 in Rome, Italy. In 2014, it was announced that she will become CERN’s next Director-General beginning in 2016. As head of Atlas, one of CERN’s principle detector projects that discovered the Higgs-Boson particle, she oversaw a team of 3,000 scientists. She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN Secretary General.

Happy birthday, Fabiola Gianotti!

photo: fabiola gianotti/origin symposium, claudia marcelloni

photo license

friend: I don't particularly like Sappho's poetry--

me: But you will lie dead, nor will there be any memory of you, now or in the future, for you will have no share in the Pierian roses, but invisible, in the house of Hades, you will wander to and fro, fluttering with the shadowy ghosts,

Goals:

1. Do science. 2. Advance the human race. 3. Make other people happy.

‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method