You just woke up from a morning nap a few minutes ago and are
thinking about an article in Discover:
** **
FROM THE JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2013
ISSUE Discover
29.
Single-Atom Transistor Created
What could this tiny
electronic switch mean for the future of computing?
In the ever-shrinking world of electronics,
vacuum tubes long ago gave way to solid-state component transistors, then to
transistors in integrated circuits. Last year an international team achieved
the next astonishing milestone in downsizing: They devised a way to make a
single-atom transistor, the smallest possible electronic switch. By controlling
electrons, that atom can modulate the flow of information and so be the
foundation of a new kind of ultrafast, ultracompact computer. The team was led
by physicist Michelle Simmons of the University of New South Wales and
electrical engineer Gerhard Klimeck of Purdue University.
The single-atom transistor is made by carving a
slot in a hydrogen-coated silicon wafer with a tunneling electron microscope
and depositing a single phosphorus atom in the hole. The phosphorus atom acts
as an electrical bucket, holding one electron—representing a single bit of
information—until it is jolted with an external voltage. The phosphorus switch
has been tested and in the future could form the basis for both traditional and
quantum computing.
**
go
to the abstract:
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v7/n4/full/nnano.2012.21.html
**
**
I
sent this to Doug the other day and to our 'travel friends' Sharon and Bill C.
a minute or two ago after they sent me the Corning Glass video on future
computers. It is amazing to think on since we have been consciously alive since
the transistor was first developed.
** **
The TR-63 was introduced in 1957 - it
was the first "pocket-sized" transistor radio ever made and the first
Sony-branded product exported to North America, by the then-named Tokyo Tsushin
Kogyo company (Tokyo Telecommuncations Engineering Corporation). It became a
huge commercial success, over 100,000 units were sold.
From: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Sony+TR-63+Transistor+Radio+Teardown/1219/1
** **
I can remember tearing down a variety of tube radios and at least two
televisions in those days. It was very cool to tear down the TR-63 and see all
the neat transistors inside. It was very cool and a delight to the mind.
Post. - Amorella
Why?
1301 hours. While in the bath I was thinking about the first time I read
about the transistor and I found when it was.
**
Transistor
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
History (Selected from History)
From November 17, 1947
to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T Bell Labs in
the United States, performed experiments and observed that when two gold point
contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the
output power greater than the input. Solid State Physics Group
leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months
worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term transistor
was coined by John R. Pierce as a portmanteau of the term "transfer
resistor". According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, authors of a
biography of John Bardeen, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent
for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as
the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeld’s patents that went into obscurity
years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal since
the idea of a field-effect transistor which used an electric field as a “grid”
was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was
the first bipolar point-contact transistor. In acknowledgement of this
accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956
Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their
discovery of the transistor effect." . . .
The first silicon
transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954. This was the work of
Gordon Teal, an expert in growing crystals of high purity, who had previously
worked at Bell Labs. The first MOS transistor actually built was by Kahng and Atalla at
Bell Labs in 1960.
Selected from:
Wikipedia - Transistor
** **
I
was delivering newspapers (The Citizen or The Citizen-Journal of
Columbus, Ohio) in 1954 and 1955. I read the newspaper every day. I am sure I
read about the first silicon transistor and I know for a fact I read about the
1956 Nobel Prize because I read every science related article in those paper
and in Popular Science when I could get my hands on one. I loved
science, but alas too much trouble in math so it wasn't an occupation for me. I
did apply for work as a writing technologist at IBM after college and I might
have got a job but you had to wear a 'company uniform' and I wasn't about to do
that for love or money. Thinking on this, it is weird because I had volunteered
into the Air Force several times. Odd contradiction in terms of accepting or not accepting 'uniforms".
Mid-afternoon. You are in the car waiting in the driveway for Carol and
you are going out for a read and a Graeter's treat. The sun is still out --
another beautiful though chilly day. You are ready to work on Dead-10.
The
scenes from book four chosen for this selection are fifteen and eighteen of
chapter one. The scene in Dead-9 was from scene seven, chapter one.
This seems like too much Amorella. (1503)
These
scenes are just a pile of bones to be reconstructed, boy. - Amorella
Scene
15 is a good all encompassing one. Shouldn't we use all this?
Begin, boy. Let's see how it goes. -
Amorella
You
have done some work, Carol just completed her book, The Associate and
you are ready to move on. - Amorella
1532 hours. Carol is relaxing but it is getting cool and the car windows
on my side are fogging up. I have most of the opening paragraph done in any
case.
You have been relaxing with the cat and
setting up the DVR for the week of selected programs. Here is what you have as
an introduction but you are concerned because it is only eighty-five percent according
to Flesch reading ease.
** **
Dead 10 drafting intro
Returned
into the stream of his scenic sanctuary, Merlyn wet and nearly naked rose near
the bank, climbed up and out and he began a run from between birch and pine,
through the vast field of bluebells, behind the stage ruins, through the great
paddock of white foxglove and red poppy, across the meadowed pinkish white
saxifrage; then through the clearing of grassy field until he reached the
flowering purple heather near the east side of the sanctuary at the Oak and
Birch forest. He came to rest and sat in the tall grass under a grand and tall
Oak and waited for either Vivian or Sophia to appear.
** **
The above is Grade 10.3 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Reading. The sentence is rather
Charles Dickens' long at 84 words, but Merlyn is running and I don't want to throw
many periods in there to trip him up.
Rules are not laws, boy, and you better off for
it. Let it go as is. Post. - Amorella
2123 hours. I have The Dead 10 completed. Is it
acceptable?
It is. - Amorella
It is not as I expected.
Add and post. All for tonight, boy. -
Amorella
***
The Dead - 10
Returned
into the stream of his sanctuary, Merlyn wet and nearly naked rose near the
bank, climbed up and out and he began a run from between birch and pine,
through the vast field of bluebells, behind the stage ruins, through the great
paddock of white foxglove and red poppy, and on through the meadowed pinkish
white saxifrage; then across the clearing of grassy field until he reached the
flowering purple heather near the east side of the sanctuary, the Oak and Birch
forest. There he came to rest and sat in the tall grass under a grand and tall
Oak waiting for either Vivian or Sophia to appear.
Shortly
or however one judges time illusionary, Sophia peeked from around the Oak.
"Thought I'd find you here, Merlyn," voiced Sophia in a coyness seemingly
borrowed from Vivian, or so Merlyn surmised.
With
his right hand he padded the imagined ground next to him. "Have a seat
beside me on this fine grass," he suggested. He scooted over obligingly.
"Are we ready for another talk to tell the Living how it was in those
early days of the first Rebellion?"
She
sighed, "I have been playing a scene over in my heartansoulanmind.
It
was on the evening of the first day and Mario, who was on my committee, wanted
to talk so he came over to my stone hut, my private sanctuary. I asked him in
and directed him to lay on the bed with me as I only had one chair. I did not
want him to appear higher than me with me on the bed and him in the chair. I
remember his first words as we lay facing one another, our heads propped up by
wool stuffed pillows.
He said, “It is pleasant here. We can a
nighttime of sleep.”
I agreed. Being dead was indeed heavenly
in our minds then he brought up his concern on how to know the Supervisor when you see herorhim. I told him that unseen doesn't
mean the Supervisor doesn't exist no
matter what name he responds to." She looked directly in to Merlyn's old
dark eyes and quietly declared. "The Supervisor has an interest in us
still."
Mario
was concerned with deception within our ranks, that we could not trust our
fellow Greeks, and what of the other Dead who are not Greek, where are they?
Merlyn broke into a broad smile. "A
wickedly good question old Mario had." He thought how each house of
culture carried its own Dead for fellow comfort. Those who thought similar
stayed with others like themselves. It was natural and a very human thing to
do.
Whether
sincere or not, Sophia always returned a smile, it was/is/will be her custom. She
continued, "It was morning of the second day and I remember what was
important to me then and now and should be important to the Living too."
"No
should's or ought's with the Living, Sophia. It is a rule the Dead must abide
by."
Sophia
reached out with her left hand and turned to be facing Merlyn straight away.
The Oak framed Merlyn's head in which she could see the image of his skull no
more there than herself in spirit.
“We
thought if we were not free in life then we would be free in death but that is
not the case in this Place. We ruminate and find camaraderie through our
personal identities, personalities and interests. The human center is Our
Mother, the first who was allowed in this Place. She is our common point. We
are equal citizens through our ancestry. We have become a hive of sensibly
silhouetted questions searching for equally reasonable responses. What else can
we do? The gods certainly don’t always help. We don’t know, really, if they
ever helped.”
She
continued, almost pleading with Merlyn. "The question among we dead is
still who am I? Is it really more easily resolved after life than why am I
here? What shall I do here? What
did I do in life? In millenniums and through two rebellions in
HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither this is still not resolved. Our newly acquired
'friends' the heartsansoulsanminds who were once Marsupial Humanoids have the
same questions, but at the same time we have adapted their name for this Place
of the Dead we now share. It seems neither of us moved. We were here together
all along and did not realize the fuller nature of being Dead yet living in the
same consciousness.
Merlyn sat Buddha-like in stature and
contemplated his ancient Greek friend's words. He thought and in the
remembrance of kind souls suggested, "There is much more to being Dead
than we know."
Hearing his words, a spark hit Sophia. She thought, he did not say, we can know.
796 words
***
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