Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 27, Page B6
What qualifies as intellectual authority today is changing fundamentally. People are much less prepared to defer to the acknowledged experts in various fields. At the same time, however, we are being swamped with data and information — a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there is a dilemma: Whom do we turn to?
Here’s the third Egghead…Christopher Mims explaining evolutionary development, known as evo-devo, considered the most important development in scientific thinking about evolution since the Modern Synthesis. Hey, subscribe to all Instant Eggheads here!
Egghead science continues with an explanation of Moore’s Law…the prediction made by Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) in 1965…that explains why we went from crazy expensive, room-sized computers to iPods, laptops and miniscule cell phones for the masses…in just four decades.
Moore noticed an early trend in the chip industry…that the number of transistors, at an optimal minimum cost, doubles every two years. A transistor is the most basic machinery that makes a computer work – it is the gate keeper to the 1s and 0s of binary code. And it’s got a special ability to be scaled down, exponentially, and still function. Nothing in history has had this ability. So transistors have scaled down, becoming smaller and smaller, and thus many and many more can fit on a single chip. And this growth in the number of transistors has followed a pretty solid pattern (it has a lot to do with cost as well…cost has decreased as number of transistors increased – that’s why all of us can afford these powerful gadgets…and why we’ve seen such a profound revolution in the use of technology in our lives.)