The Physical World · physical·7
The electron, the transistor, and the bridge to computing
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How the physics of matter became the information age. The electron is found (1897), understood inside solids by quantum mechanics, and then bent to human purposes in the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 — the device that turns the whole curriculum's abstractions about information into something you can etch onto silicon by the billion.
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resources
- ○Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age— Michael Riordan & Lillian Hoddesonanchor · book
- ○The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation— Jon Gertnercompanion · book
- ○The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann— Ananyo Bhattacharyacompanion · book
- ○Understanding Physics, Vol. 3: The Electron, Proton, and Neutron— Isaac Asimovoptional · book
sessions
unlocks The Information path and the lineage of thinking machines — this is the hardware the bit actually runs on. Von Neumann's stored-program architecture, met here, is cross-cut by his quantum-measurement formalism on the Quantum path and his self-reproducing automata on the emergence-and-life unit.