The discrete charm of the machine : why the world became digital / Ken Steiglitz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Steiglitz, Kenneth, 1939- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Digital communications.

Technological innovations.

Physical Description:

xvii, 235 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2019]

Summary:

Explains the genesis of the digital idea and why it transformed civilization, delving into the varied physical and logical reasons behind this radical transformation.

Contents:

Part I A Century of Valves p. 1

1 The Discrete Revolution p. 3

1.1 My Golden Age of Garbage p. 3

1.2 Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technology p. 4

1.3 Some Terminology p. 6

2 What's Wrong with Analog? p. 10

2.1 Signals and Noise p. 10

2.2 Reproduction and Storage p. 11

2.3 The Origins of Noise p. 11

2.4 Thermal Noise in Electronics p. 12

2.5 Other Noise in Electronics p. 13

2.6 Digital Immunity p. 17

2.7 Analog Rot p. 19

2.8 Caveats p. 20

3 Signal Standardization p. 22

3.1 A Reminiscence p. 22

3.2 Ones and Zeros p. 22

3.3 Directivity of Control p. 24

3.4 Gates p. 24

3.5 The Electron p. 25

3.6 Edison's Lightbulb Problems p. 26

3.7 De Forest's Audion p. 27

3.8 The Vacuum Tube as Value p. 30

3.9 The Rest of Logic p. 33

3.10 Clocks and Doorbells p. 34

3.11 Memory p. 35

3.12 Other Ways to Build Values p. 36

4 Consequential Physics p. 43

4.1 When Physics Become Discrete p. 43

4.2 The Absolute Size of Things p. 46

4.3 The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle p. 47

4.4 Explaining Wave-Particle Duality p. 49

4.5 The Pauli Exclusion Principle p. 49

4.6 Atomic Physics p. 53

4.7 Semiconductors p. 54

4.8 The P-N Junction p. 56

4.9 The Transistor p. 58

4.10 Quantum Tunneling p. 59

14.11 Speed p. 60

5 Your Computer Is a Photograph p. 62

5.1 Room at the Bottom p. 62

5.2 The Computer as Microphotograph p. 64

5.3 Heisenberg in the Chip Foundry p. 66

5.4 Moore's Law and the Time of Silicon: ca. 1960? p. 68

5.5 The Exponential Wall p. 74

Part II Sound and Pictures p. 77

6 Music from Bits p. 79

6.1 The Monster in 1957 p. 79

6.2 A Chance Encounter with a D to A Converter p. 81

6.3 Sampling and Monsieur Fourier p. 82

6.4 Nyquist's Sampling Principle p. 83

6.5 Another Win for Digital p. 86

6.6 Another Isomorphism p. 88

7 Communication in a Noisy World p. 90

7.1 Claude Shannon's 1948 Paper p. 90

7.2 Measuring Information p. 91

7.3 Entropy p. 94

7.4 Noisy Channels p. 96

7.5 Coding p. 97

7.6 The Noisy Coding Theorem p. 101

7.7 Another Win for Digital p. 102

Part III Computation p. 105

8 Analog Computers p. 107

8.1 From the Ancient Greeks p. 107

8.2 More Ingenious Devices p. 111

8.3 Deeper Questions p. 117

8.4 Computing with soap Films p. 119

8.5 Local and Global p. 121

8.6 Differntial Equations p. 123

8.7 Integration p. 125

8.8 Lord Kelvin's Research Program p. 126

8.9 The Electronic Analog Computer p. 129

9 Turning's Machine p. 132

9.1 The Ingredients of a Turing Machine p. 132

9.2 The All-Analog Machine p. 133

9.3 The Partly Digital Computer p. 134

9.4 A Reminiscence: The Stored-Program Loom in New Jersey p. 135

9.5 Monsieur Jacquard's Loom p. 136

9.6 Charles Babbage p. 138

9.7 Babbage's Analytical Engine p. 141

9.8 Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace p. 143

9.9 Turing's Abstraction p. 144

10 Intrinsic Difficulty p. 148

10.1 Being Robust p. 148

10.2 The Polynomial/Exponential Dichotomy p. 149

10.3 Turing Equivalence p. 151

10.4 Two Important Problems p. 153

10.5 Problems with Easily Checked Certificates (NP) p. 154

10.6 Reducing One Problem to Another p. 156

10.7 Yes/No Problems p. 157

10.8 Cook's Theorem: 3-SAT Is NP-Complete p. 158

10.9 Thousands More NP-Complete Problems p. 160

11 Searching for Magic p. 164

11.1 Analog Attacks on NP-Complete Problems p. 164

11.2 The Missing Law p. 169

11.3 The Church-Turing Thesis p. 170

11.4 The Extended Church-Turing Thesis p. 171

11.5 Locality: From Einstein to Bell p. 172

11.6 Behind the Quantum Curtain p. 176

11.7 Quantum Hacking p. 178

11.8 The Power of Quantum Computers p. 179

11.9 Life Itself p. 180

11.10 The Uncertain Limits of Computation p. 182

Part IV Today and Tomorrow p. 183

12 The Internet, Then the Robots p. 185

12.1 Ideas p. 185

12.2 The Internet: Packets, Not Circuits p. 187

12.3 The Internet: Photons, Not Electrons p. 189

12.4 Enter Artificial Intelligence p. 193

12.5 Deep Learning p. 194

12.6 Obstacles p. 196

12.7 Enter Robots p. 202

12.8 The Problem of Consciousness p. 204

12.9 The Question of Values p. 206.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-228) and index.

ISBN:

9780691179438

0691179433

OCLC:

1060594647