5 Nanometers
PRECISION / MACRO & MINI SIDE-BY-SIDE
The Inspiration
I recently read the book “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World” by Simon Winchester. The link provides a long-form discussion with the author. The book was the inspiration for tonight’s post. For those that share my treadmill habit, this is a LONG INTERVIEW so you will be able to get lots of steps in. We need diversions in the wintertime in the tundra.
The Setup
A possible statement of the premise for the book above is straightforward. The history of the progress of the world is painted by following the ability to make things with increasing precision on a smaller and smaller scale. With each improvement in precision, mankind unlocks greater and greater means to explore the world at both the very small and very large scale. The simplest examples are the polishing of mirrors and glass. The more precise we get, the better the microscopes and telescopes get. There are lots of cool small things (viruses) to learn about as well as large things (galaxies) to know about.
If you have watched science fiction you may have been exposed to words like nanobots. Unfortunately, such talk presents challenges for a couple of reasons. In a recent post, I talked about words we hear but may not understand like “anti-oxidants”. So what is a nanometer? A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The ability to (1) understand the scale of the nanometer, (2) observe phenomena on the nanometer scale, and finally (3) build things on the nanometer scale leads to understanding. All of this has come to pass in the last 150 years.
The magnitude of what has been achieved by modern science is hard to grasp. One molecule of water is less than one nanometer wide. There are about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water in a droplet. Think about that the next time you sweat! In tribute to how hard that is to grasp, there are about 1000 times as many water molecules in a single droplet (your sweat) as there are grains of sand on earth! I believe that because of the remarkable achievements of science and understanding our world at its largest and smallest scale, we are at a loss to grasp most of this.
Where We Have Arrived
Most of us accept all of this on faith, sometimes due to the magical but addictive item, we keep close by at all times (our SmartPhones coupled with a search engine). I use the word faith because my premise today is that the advancement of science and understanding of our universe has brought us to a point wherein science has become sufficiently complex that we accept some of it by faith, akin to religion in some ways. I would imagine that if I kept a journal of the next 100 things I witness, I doubt that I understand how many of them work, I merely accept it by faith. This is perhaps why broad attacks on expertise and just “saying and repeating stupid stuff” are so dangerous.
Most of us lack the training or patience to understand any of this. What do I mean by “this”. I think that most of us lack the detailed precepts of our own faith in much the same way we lack the detailed precepts of how our world works at the atomic level. I freely admit I am one of those people. When I meet a person who seems to have a firm grasp of either domain, I am simultaneously (1) intrigued to learn more, and (2) somewhat in awe of the breadth of their knowledge.
I thought that presenting our recent progress is an interesting way to look at things. I am going to focus on three interesting areas we have focused our precision efforts. I will structure the discussion to cover mechanical, electrical, and optical things.
James Watt is an important person in the history of the world. In 1769, he fashioned and introduced an early version of the steam engine. In coordination with another inventor named Wilkinson, his steam engine became PRACTICAL and USEFUL when Mr. Wilkinson offered the capability to make a hole with a drill to a precision of 0.1 inches. Thereafter the piston and the cylinder did not leak very much and steam power became a reliable reality. The practicality of the steam engine emerges in 1776. Today, we can fashion pipes of the smallest imaginable scale. Here is a video about a catastrophic airplane engine failure aboard an Airbus A380 that was due to an anomaly in a pipe that was only a fraction of a millimeter too thin in its wall. The dimension of the pipe is something to behold! The pipe in question had walls that were only 0.35 mm in thickness (about 14/1000 of an inch).
Watt is SO IMPORTANT to this modern world that the metric system even named the unit of power after him. For those nostalgics who still like the inch and furlong, it is a good time to stop with the horsepower stuff! I believe that the proper way to envision what Watt meant to our world: (1) people ate food sufficient to use muscle power to perform useful work (2) people stumbled upon domesticable animals and used them to multiply their work (3) people used nature (water) to turn a wheel and begin grinding stuff (4) Watt transformed the world allowing one machine to do the work of thousands.
The methods of glassblowing emerged about 4500 years ago. It is thought that an anonymous Italian got around to basic eyeglasses in the 13th Century. Since there wasn’t much to read until the invention of the printing press, demand for eyeglasses exploded thereafter. The telescope followed soon thereafter. I enjoy the images we have been fortunate to observe from the Hubble Space Telescope. A technical challenge in the machining of the mirror led to blurry images in the beginning. The mirror is about eight feet across. The defect in question was a deviation in the curvature of the mirror of 1/50 of the width of a human hair. We live in amazing times!
Finally, we come to the most amazing example of the precision of all. When the first transistors were developed in 1948, they were the size of a human hand. Today the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) contract manufactures the A12 bionic chip for Apple. This remarkable chip is about 3/8” squared. It contains nearly seven billion transistors. That is about the size of a fingernail. That little chip is what makes your iPhones and iPads go. In 72 years of Moore’s Law, which struggles to continue its advance but is still proceeding today we have made mind-boggling progress. Remember that the first transistor was about the size of your hand. The A12 Bionic is built on wire paths that are now only 5 nanometers apart. As stated above, that little fingernail-sized chip contains nearly 7 billion transistors. It is reported that the next Apple A13 Bionic will narrow the width of the road to 3 nanometers. I started with a difficult-to-grasp analogy about a drop of sweat. We can finish with the observation that the world now has more transistors than all the leaves on all the trees of the world. While the first statement was all about nature, the second is all about us. We are progressing at unbelievable rates. A wonderful time to be alive. So many of these transistors, at their most fundamental level, are computing something.
A frequent reader knows my impatience with the pace of change. I remain an optimist because of the rapidity of improvement in such fundamentals as the growth of transistors. This is an objective measure of the advancement of our planet. Whether these transistors are used to check a Facebook Newsfeed or explore the underlying causes of cancer, the sheer scale of our achievements can lead to immeasurable improvement (or setback) in the human condition. This offers us a path to a more perfect world. Let’s not squander it on social media. Here’s a tune.
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