Word: physicist
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What we've discovered doing this series is that while not every futurist is optimistic, most of the fun ones are. Michio Kaku, a physicist who discusses what will replace silicon chips in powering computers (try DNA), can't wait for the day when "objects will be animate and intelligent, and they'll talk to us. It'll be like a Disney movie. Our grandchildren will be incredulous that we lived way back when things didn't answer when you spoke to them...
...fact, nanotechnology has an impeccable and longstanding scientific pedigree. It was back in 1959 that Richard Feynman, arguably the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein, gave a talk titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he suggested that it would one day be possible to build machines so tiny they would consist of just a few thousand atoms. (The term nanotechnology comes from nanometer, or a billionth of a meter; a typical virus is about 100 nanometers across...
...course, cyber Cassandras have been tolling the bell for Moore's law for decades. As physicist Carver Mead puts it, "The Chicken Little sky-is-falling articles are a recurring theme." But even Mead admits that by 2014 the laws of physics may have their final revenge. Transistor components are fast approaching the dreaded point-one limit--when the width of transistor components reaches .1 microns and their insulating layers are only a few atoms thick. Last year Intel engineer Paul Packan publicly sounded the alarm in Science magazine, warning that Moore's law could collapse. He wrote, "There...
...idea dates back to a 1959 speech by physicist Richard Feynman in which he proposed manipulating matter atom by atom and was championed most famously in K. Eric Drexler's 1986 book Engines of Creation...
...each claimed to have found a way to make light travel faster than its regular cruising speed of 186,000 m.p.s. According to the special theory of relativity, that's verboten; the velocity of light is supposed to be the cosmic speed limit, which nothing can exceed. Nevertheless, a physicist, Lijun Wang of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., says he revved up a beam of light as much as 300 times its normal speed, using a special chamber filled with cesium gas. Now let's see him prove...