Gordon Moore was in a merry mood last night at a charity dinner. We swapped childhood stories about rockets and explosives. He used to mix his own nitroglycerin and dynamite.
We also spoke about the myriad industries that have been disrupted by the steady march of Moore’s Law, from Tesla cars to synthetic genomics.
The non-linear exponentiation of technological capabilities is a fundamental and perpetual source of disruption that creates opportunities for entrepreneurship and new products. Apple could predict exactly when the price of hard drives and then flash memory would enable the iPod to disrupt the Sony Walkman business.
Moore’s Law drives electronics, communications and computers and has become a primary driver in drug discovery and bioinformatics, medical imaging and diagnostics.
More than a niche subject of interest only to chip designers, the continued march of Moore’s Law will affect all of the sciences, as they migrate from lab to simulation. Accurate simulation demands computational power, and once a sufficient threshold has been crossed, simulation acts as an innovation accelerant over physical experimentation. Many more questions can be answered per day.
NASA Ames recently shut down their wind tunnels. As Moore’s Law provided enough computational power to model turbulence and airflow, there was no longer a need to test iterative physical design variations of aircraft in the wind tunnels, and the pace of innovative design exploration dramatically accelerated.
Recent accuracy thresholds have been crossed in diverse areas, such as modeling the weather (predicting a thunderstorm six hours in advance) and automobile collisions (a relief for the crash test dummies), and the thresholds have yet to be crossed for many areas, such as protein folding dynamics.
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