IN 1965, a year before the first pocket calculator was invented, a young physicist from Silicon Valley, Gordon Moore, made a daring prediction. He claimed that the number of components squeezed onto a single silicon chip would double about every two years. And double, and double and continue to double. If he had been right, the best silicon chips today would contain an unbelievable 100 million single components.
The true figure is more like 2 billion: Moore had underestimated how fast the shrinking trend would take off. Since the mid-1970s, though, his "law" has been a bankable certainty, influencing economic, social and scientific developments in ways that are hard to overstate. Google, genome sequencing, multiplayer video games, the search for the "God particle": all rely on silicon's seemingly limitless ability to deliver more computing speed and capacity - for an ever-diminishing price.
Moore's law means that the cellphone ...
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