Spiral

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.” The image faded and was replaced by an aerial view of the gridlike streets of Midtown Manhattan. “A circuit as complex as Manhattan could fit on the tip of my finger,” he said. “And unlike a real city, there are no traffic jams, no gridlock. All of it works flawlessly. Not a single packet of electrons out of place.

“In a computer chip, time is also miniaturized. Your computer can do operations-multiply two numbers, or communicate with its neighbors-about once every nanosecond. A one-gigahertz processor makes roughly a billion computations a second. Think about it. A billion in one second. You only live for, at most, three billion seconds. In only three ticks of the clock, a computer has as many thoughts as you will have in your whole life.” Jake stopped to let that sink in. “So every three seconds, your computer is like the entire population of Manhattan living a lifetime. And people wonder why it takes so long to boot up.”

A few laughs rippled through the students.

“Miniaturization was the most revolutionary force in the second half of the twentieth century. From Bill Gates to Gordon Moore, empires have been made constructing and controlling tiny electron cities that have lifetimes of thoughts in seconds. Computers, in effect, miniaturized our thoughts. But humans do more than think. What else do we do?”

“Sleep,” someone called from the back. More laughs.

“True enough. What else?”

“Move. We walk around.”

“Right. We walk. But walking is a pretty sophisticated form of locomotion. Let’s start with something simpler. What about crawling, for example? Can we make machines that crawl?

“Let me introduce a couple of my graduate students,” Jake said. He waved, and they came up on stage. “This is Joe Xu and Dave Gruber. They’ve got something to show you.”

Jake kept going while Dave and Joe set up. “How many of you have heard of DARPA?”

A few hands went up.

“DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a kind of military venture-capital firm-always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. The Internet, the global positioning system, and the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, those were all DARPA projects. Most sink like a stone, but those that succeed can change the world.