Gilder, the quantum era

According to Gilder, the quantum era is still unfolding in a fourfold transformation of the world—in science, technology, business, politics—and even in philosophy. But all the changes converge in one epochal event: the overthrow of matter.
The change originates in the microcosm of quantum theory itself – which overthrew matter in the physical sciences.

At the foundation of the universe, Isaac Newton’s hard, inert, and indivisible solids gave way to a rich panoply of paradoxical sparks, comprising waves and particles that violate every principle of Newtonian solidity.

At the root of all the cascading changes of modern economic life—devaluing material resources in technology, business, and geopolitics—is this original overthrow of material solidity in the science of matter itself.
The second step in the overthrow of matter came in the use of quantum theory to overcome the material limits of weight, heat, and force in the creation of new machines. The industrial age essentially managed and manipulated matter from the outside, lifting it against gravity, moving it against friction, melting or burning it to change its form. The quantum era manipulates matter from the inside, adapting its inner structure to human purposes.

In the microchip, combining millions of components operating in billionths of seconds in a space the size of the wing of a fly, human beings built a machine that overcame all the conventional limits of mechanical time and space. Made essentially of the silicon in sand—one of the most common substances in earth—microchips find their value not in their substance but in their intellectual content: their design or software.

The third great manifestation of the overthrow of matter is the impact of this technology on the world of business. By overcoming the constraints of material resources, the microchip has devalued most large accumulations of physical capital and made possible the launching of global economic enterprises by one entrepreneur at a workstation.

With the overthrow of the constraints of material scarcity, gravity, and friction, large bureaucracies in government and business lose their power over individual creators and entrepreneurs.
The fourth phase of the overthrow of matter is the collapse of the value of natural resources and territory in determining the distribution of power among nations. The microcosms of science, technology, and enterprise have converged in a global quantum economy that transcends all the usual measures of national power and wealth.

El transistor (bardeen y los colaboradores en el premio nobel)

El transistor (bardeen y los colaboradores en el premio nobel)

En el centro de todo esta el electron.

Most interested people understand much of what electrons do. But very few have any clear idea of what an electron actually is, or its implications for the concept of matter and its overthrow in the world economy.

From the telephone to the human brain, from the television set to the computer, information mostly flows in the form of electrons. This function of electrons has quantum roots. As in Planck’s black body radiation, electrons do not respond to applied energy in a continuous, proportional, or linear way. They are non-linear; they have quantum thresholds and resonances. These quantum functions shape their electrical properties. In order to move through a solid, electrons must be freed from their atoms, jumping from one energy state to a free state across measurable energy “band gaps” in strict accordance with quantum rules. These rules give electrons identifiable and controllable features that can be used to convey information.

With controlled pulses of electrons down wires, computers could be interconnected around the world. With controlled flows of electrons in and out of tiny capacitors, computer memories could be constantly read, written, and restored.

Crossing decisively into the microcosm, Heisenberg declared that the waves which Bohr had examined in recreating the atom were not conventional waves at all. Designated “probability amplitudes,” they were waves or fields that defined the statistical likelihood of finding an electron at any particular location. This was a climactic step in the overthrow of materialism in physics. With the electron itself depicted as a wave and the wave depicted as a probability field, the specific particle in this theory had disappeared into a cloud. With it disappeared the last shreds of Newtonian logic and mechanistic solidity.

As Bohr put it, quantum theory required “a final renunciation of the classical idea of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.”

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Los encargados de aplicar en forma práctica la teoría cuántica, fueron los inventores del transistor en 1948, lo cual significó un hito en la historia del desarrollo de las tecnologias de información.

John Bardeen (1908-1991), William B. Shockley (1910-1989), and Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987)

Bardeen en su Nobel Lecture de 1947 establece que en la raiz de toda la investigacion que condujo al desarrollo del primer transistor estuvo la Wilson’s quantum mechanical theory, based on the energy band model, and describing conduction in terms of excess electrons and holes. It is fundamental to all subsequent developments. The theory shows how the concentration of carriers depends on the temperature and on impurities.

JO H N BA R D E E N Semiconductor research leading to the point contact transistor

Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1956

Del mecanicismo causistico a lo probabilistico

Del mecanicismo causistico a lo probabilistico

Today most sophisticated people imagine that they have transcended Newton and have come to terms with the findings of modern science. But they have not. As an intellectual faith, materialist logic still prevails.

We still believe that the solid world we see and feel—governed by determinate chains of cause and effect, rooted in Newtonian masses and forces—is real and in some sense definitive. The atom may not be ultimate, but they assume some other particle is, perhaps the quark.

At the foundations of the physical world, so it is supposed, are physical solids—”building blocks”—that resemble in some way the solids we see. They link together in causal chains of mechanical logic like a set of cogs and levers. These solids are deemed to comprise all matter, from atoms and billiard balls to bricks and the human brain.

Announced in 1913 and proved for the single electron of the hydrogen atom, the Bohr model was the first great vindication of quantum theory. One test of scientific advance is whether it extends the realms of human understanding and control.

The established physics could not explain the effectiveness of chemistry, let alone extend it to atoms. Unlike a solar system, atoms do not exist in majestic isolation. Ceaselessly in movement, they endlessly jiggle together in what is called Brownian motion. We even step on them. In a world of Newtonian continuities, electron orbits would vary continually as atoms collided with one another. Constantly knocked loose in these collisions, electrons in a conductor should flow far more copiously and respond to heat more massively than experiments showed.

Reunifying chemistry and physics in the microcosm, the new model of the atom explained the apparent solidity of the physical world. Establishing a gap, called a band gap, between an electron in its ground state and an electron excited to a higher energy level, the new physics showed why the constant collisions of atoms do not cause the atomic structure to collapse. A small collision will not affect an atom. An electron will not respond to any small disturbance. It will react only if it receives its necessary quantum of energy, defined by its resonant frequency times Planck’s constant.

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