Reality Crowd

For more than four decades Moore’s Law has been consistently correct, and since 1965 scientists have made silicon chips twice as efficient about every 18 months. We all experience this exponential increase in processing power directly: by the changing tools we use, the increasing capabilities of software and computer hardware, changing physical and social systems, and especially by the way change keeps coming faster. Think about how much technology has changed over your lifetime.

This speeding-up process has become an important part of the way our society functions. As noted by Michael Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at the National Science Foundation, human and economic progress in the U.S. over the past 20 years has depended on the predictability of this growth.

Silicon chips, however, do have limitations--physical limitations on how small a scale you can actually place transistors on an integrated circuit. When you get down to the atomic scale, there’s not much further you can go, and quantum effects will start to pose serious problems. Moore’s Law will reach an end, predicted to be within the next 10 to 20 years. Will we find new innovations to leave Moore’s Law in the dust? Many hope so.

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I don’t walk through walls or watch objects around me appear and disappear. I’d be labeled crazy if I thought that was the way the world behaved. Most people agree that the world around us obeys physical laws that are consistent and predictable. But when you look at the world of the very small--around the size of atoms or smaller--the seemingly impossible and delusional scenario is actually the truth, and our world appears an even greater mystery.

The three following videos show effects of quantum mechanics, all describing very different phenomena to hopefully give a broad view.

-Quantum Tunneling-
One of the strange things about quantum mechanics is that you can never be certain where a particle is in space. You can only tell where the particle is likely to be. I used to think that was because our measuring devices were faulty or something like that, however, small particles actually do appear and disappear and change location inexplicably. This video on quantum tunneling shows how we know that this is an accurate description of how particles really do behave.

-Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle-
Particles are elusive to measurement at the small scale. The more precisely you want to measure something, the more elusive it becomes.

-Superfluid Helium-
This stuff is really fascinating. Although the video doesn’t address the helium particles on the small scale, it is an excellent description of the quantum effects on helium when it is cooled to less than two degrees above absolute zero. As I understand it, when the helium is cooled to that temperature, the atoms are no longer like points but more like ribbons; the helium particles begin to stretch out and become long and overlap each other. This overlapping makes it impossible to distinguish any one particle from another so the liquid’s particles exist in all locations at the same time.

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