Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (50 page)

79.
Berlin,
The Man Behind the Microchip
, p. 100.

80.
Over the same period, the global silicon transistor business, focused in the US, grew from $32 million to around $90 million.

81.
A resistor is used to restrict the flow of electrical current in a circuit, while capacitors are used as a store of electrical energy. Along with transistors, these are essential components in the building of logic gates.

82.
Moore’s law is not really a law, but, rather, an observation and a series of steps taken by the semiconductor industry. In fact, the continuing validity of Moore’s law is partly self-fulfilling. The trend is one that those in the highly competitive computer industry recognise they must, at the very least, keep pace with, if they are to survive. In reality, the number of components on a chip double every eighteen months, rather than every year, as originally observed by Moore.

83.
‘Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits’,
Electronics
magazine, 1965, in David C. Brock,
Understanding Moore’s Law
:
Four Decades of Innovation
(Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Press, 2006), p. 55.

84.
Andrew Grove,
Only the Paranoid Survive
(London: HarperCollins, 1997).

85.
Ibid., p. 30.

86.
Information is encoded in particles of light called photons which are then sent down optical glass cables. Powerful lasers must be used to send light over long distances without the intensity dramatically decreasing. It was the invention of these lasers rather than glass fibres, which had existed for some time, that enabled the development of optical fibre communication systems in the 1970s.

87.
Ray Kurzweil,
The Singularity Is Near
:
When Humans Transcend Biology
(London: Duckworth, 2005), p. 7.

88.
Ari Shulman, ‘Why minds are not like computers’,
New Atlantis
, Winter 2009.

89.
Gordon Moore, ‘Moore’s Law at 40’, in Brock,
Understanding Moore’s Law
, p. 6.

90.
We create data at a rapidly increasing rate, whether on personal computers, in big data centres or scientific research institutions (such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which produces 15 million gigabytes of data every year). Copper struggles to handle such immense data flow; sufficient electrons cannot be moved fast enough over long distances. For example, big data centres are facing a ‘performance bottleneck’ because of their continued use of copper data connections. Currently, the processing cores and memory storage must sit side by side as copper cables can only transfer data over a short distance. Silicon photonics devices could enable these components to be separated so that all the processors, which produce most of the heat in a computer, can all be placed together. As a result, the power needed to cool the system would be dramatically reduced.

91.
Named after futurist architect Buckminster Fuller for its resemblance to his geodesic dome designs.

92.
Graphene’s strength results from the powerful atomic bonds between carbon atoms and the flexibility of the bonds, which allow graphene to be stretched by up to a fifth of its normal size without being damaged.

93.
In two-dimensional graphene, electrons can only move in the horizontal plane; there is no vertical movement. This dramatically reduces the rate at which electrons scatter off each other. The flow of electrons across graphene’s surface is like the flow of cars down a motorway. The large number of electrons that can move at high speed, so-called ‘ballistic conduction’, results in graphene’s extremely high electrical and thermal conductivity.

94.
Interview with Novoselov, 19 March 2012.

95.
K. S. Novoselov and A. K. Geim et al., ‘Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films’,
Science
, 306, p. 666 (2004).

96.
‘Physics Nobel Honors Work on Ultra-Thin Carbon’,
New York Times
, 5 October 2010.
www.nytimes.com
. ‘The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010’. Nobelprize.org

97.
An electric current is produced in graphene when it absorbs photons. If a way can be found to harness this current, then it could be used to produce solar cells.

98.
This is the Gartner’s ‘hype cycle’. After the initial excitement of a new discovery, there is usually a ‘trough of disillusionment’, before a gently rising productive plateau emerges,
www.gartner.com

99.
Most touch screens are made from an electrical insulator, such as glass, coated with a thin layer of transparent conductor. Electric current flows across the conductor. The human body conducts electricity and so when you touch the screen some current is drawn from the screen at the point of contact, changing the current flowing across the screen. The change in current is then measured by sensors at the edge of the screen and interpreted by the computer. This is why touch screens do not work when gloves are worn, since they are electrical insulators. Most touch screens are made using tin indium oxide for the conducting layer, but it is both expensive and breaks easily. Graphene is thin, hard-wearing and very conductive and so could make cheaper, faster and more enduring touch screens.

1.
Agricola,
De re metallica
, p. 18.

2.
Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, Commanding General of the Army Services of Supply (at the time Groves was a colonel). Leslie Groves,
Now It Can be Told
(New York: De Capa Press, 1962), p. 4.

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