(Roughly) Daily

Alan Jacobs quotes from Freeman Dyson‘s epic 1998 book, Imagined Worlds…

It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedom represented by Tolstoy. In the world of computers, Napoleon is the massive IBM main-frame; Tolstoy is the humble Macintosh. The computer revolution was an escape from the Napoleonic ambitions of von Neumann to the Tolstoyan anarchy of the Internet. Future revolutions will bring more such escapes.

Jacobs goes on to observe…

The big AI companies are the apotheosis — literally, in the view of many who work for them — of Napoleonic science. The open web and the world of hobbyist and small-scale devices (often built on the Raspberry Pi) are our remaining refuges of Tolstoyan computing.

See also: “Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In? – Our surprisingly Napoleonic twenty-first century,” in which Erik Larson unpacks Dyson’s thinking and reconciles it to the world of 2022 (when Larson wrote the piece).

* Donella Meadows

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As we contemplate culture, we might spare a thought for Jack Kilby; he died on this date in 2005. An electrical engineer, he made a– if not the— foundational advance that moved us into the age we’re now navigating: the integrated curcuit (or as we know it, the chip).

In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation.  So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance).  He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem. 

Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later).  Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

source

Kilby’s first integrated circuit