A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer by George Johnson (Eng

Description: A Shortcut Through Time by George Johnson The author of Strange Beauty and Fire in the Mind combines the latest advances in mathematics and physics with ground-breaking computer science to examine the possibility for the development of the quantum computer, a breakthrough that could allow a shortcut through time. Reprint. 20,000 first print FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In this remarkably illustrative and thoroughly accessible look at one of the most intriguing frontiers in science and computers, award-winning New York Times writer George Johnson reveals the fascinating world of quantum computing—the holy grail of super computers where the computing power of single atoms is harnassed to create machines capable of almost unimaginable calculations in the blink of an eye.As computer chips continue to shrink in size, scientists anticipate the end of the road: A computer in which each switch is comprised of a single atom. Such a device would operate under a different set of physical laws: The laws of quantum mechanics. Johnson gently leads the curious outsider through the surprisingly simple ideas needed to understand this dream, discussing the current state of the revolution, and ultimately assessing the awesome power these machines could have to change our world. Author Biography George Johnson writes about science for The New York Times. His most recent books, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics and Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, were finalists for the Aventis and Rhone-Poulenc science book prizes. He has also won the AAAS Science Journalism Award. He is codirector of the Santa Fe Science-Writing Workshop and a former Alicia Patterson fellow. Mr. Johnson lives in Santa Fe. He can be reached on the World Wide Web at talaya.net. Review "Sets a new standard for science writing . . . a delight and a rare gem."—The New York Times"Using metaphors instead of mathematics, George Johnson brings clarity to the strange world of the quantum computer."— Scientific American"He makes you smart and quantum computing real." -- Kevin Kelly, Wired"Lucid and accessible. . . . Johnson does a fine job of telling a story that makes sense both to those who are completely at home in the mathematical theory of the subatomic world and to those whose reaction to the theory is abject terror. . . . A beguiling combination of clarity and enthusiasm." — New Scientist Review Quote "Sets a new standard for science writing . . . a delight and a rare gem."- The New York Times "Using metaphors instead of mathematics, George Johnson brings clarity to the strange world of the quantum computer."- Scientific American "He makes you smart and quantum computing real." -- Kevin Kelly, Wired "Lucid and accessible. . . . Johnson does a fine job of telling a story that makes sense both to those who are completely at home in the mathematical theory of the subatomic world and to those whose reaction to the theory is abject terror. . . . A beguiling combination of clarity and enthusiasm." - New Scientist From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 "Simple Electric Brain Machines and How to Make Them" I dont know where I first saw the advertisement for the Geniac Electric Brain construction kit, but I knew I had to have one for Christmas. It was the early 1960s, and like a lot of science-crazed kids I was obsessed with the wonderfully outrageous idea of "thinking machines." I devoured the picture stories in Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post about the electronic behemoths manufactured by companies like International Business Machines, Univac, and Remington Rand. The spinning tape drives and banks of blinking lights were as exciting to me as the idea of space travel. Two of my favorite books were Tom Swift and His Giant Robot and Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine-testaments to the eerie fantasy of automating human thought. One day, flipping through one of my favorite magazines-probably Boys Life or Popular Science-I stumbled upon an unbelievably tantalizing ad. "Can you think faster than this Machine?" Below the provocative headline was a picture of the Geniac with its sloping panel bedecked with six large dials and a row of ten bulbs. Who knew what kind of mysterious circuitry was hidden inside? "GENIAC, the first electrical brain construction kit, is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and decipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. . . . You create from over 400 specially designed and manufactured components a machine that solves problems faster than you can express them." Such was the promise of the Oliver Garfield Co., 126 Lexington Avenue, New York 16, N.Y. (This was before zip codes replaced the old numbered postal zones.) To a boy growing up in Albuquerque, the location of this modern Frankenstein laboratory seemed promisingly exotic and far away. "Send for your GENIAC kit now. Only $19.95. . . . We guarantee that if you do not want to keep GENIAC after two weeks you can return it for full refund plus shipping costs." There was nothing to lose. I began my lobbying effort, making it clear to my parents that receiving a Geniac was all that mattered to me. Then I waited, my brain charged with the kind of high-voltage anticipation that can only accumulate in someone still in the first decade of life. Christmas morning I sat on the floor anxiously opening presents, keeping my eye out for one large enough to hold the pieces of an electronic computer. Finally a likely box emerged from behind the tree. I tore off the wrapping. Decades later I still remember the disappointment I felt as I explored the contents of the cardboard package. The title of the instruction manual was intriguing enough: "Simple Electric Brain Machines and How to Make Them." But how was anyone to carry out such an ambitious project with the meager, humdrum parts that had been supplied? Digging through the pile, I was crestfallen to find that the bulk of the kit consisted of some decidedly low-tech pieces of particle board called Masonite: a big square one and six smaller round disks, each drilled with concentric patterns of little holes. This was complemented by an assortment of hardware you might find in a kitchen junk drawer or a toolbox in the garage: ten flashlight bulbs and sockets, a battery and battery clamp, a spool of insulated wire, several dozen nuts, bolts, and washers, a bunch of small brass-plated staples (referred to in the typewritten instructions as "jumpers"), and the tools for assembling this detritus into what would supposedly function as a digital computer-a hexagonal wrench for gripping bolts (a "spintite") and a screwdriver. Finally there was a simple on-off switch, described rather melodramatically in the manual: "This is the switch that enables you to put suspense and drama into your machine; for you set everything the way it should be, then talk about it and explain it, and finally when you have your listener all keyed up and ready, you (or he) throw the switch . . ." Id been had. There were no vacuum tubes, no transistors, or capacitors, or resistors-the colorful components Id found from eviscerating dead radios and TV sets. All Id gotten for Christmas was a handy-dandy kit for stringing together mindlessly simple circuits of switches and bulbs. The nuts and bolts were to be placed in various holes on the square wooden panel and connected one to the other by wires running underneath. The little metal jumpers were to be inserted into holes in the Masonite disks, the ends bent over to keep them in place. When the disks were attached to the panel, with more bolts and washers, they could be turned to and fro so that the jumpers touched the heads of the bolts, forming connections that caused the lightbulbs to flash on and off. It was all just switches-simple enough for a child to understand. Reluctantly I opened the manual, published, disconcertingly, in 1955, and saw that it contained the familiar explanations of the wonders of electricity. ("You can think of a battery as a pump, which is able to push electrons, or little marbles of electricity, away from the plus end of the battery and towards the minus end of the battery . . . A flow of electrons is an electric current.") The instructions went on to show how to assemble circuits and switches into various question-answering machines. 1.Whom do you prefer: (a) Marilyn Monroe? or (b) Liberace? 2.How would you put a thread in a small hole: (a) wet it? or (b) tap it? 3.Would you rather spend a day: (a) shopping on Fifth Avenue? or (b) hunting in the woods? Depending on how you answered these and three other questions (rotating the six circular switches so that they pointed to A or B), the current in the wiring would flow to one of two bulbs, M or F. The result was called a "Masculine-Feminine Testing Machine." Never mind the musty Eisenhower-era philosophy. Scientifically, the whole thing seemed obvious and dumb. Just changing the paper labels would turn the machine into a tester for, say, whether you were a Jock or a Brain (the 1960s version of "nerd"): "Would you rather spend a rainy afternoon: (a) building a crystal radio? or (b) working out in the gym?" The meaning was all in the eye of the beholder. As I paged through the manual, other projects appeared slightly more interesting. The switches could be wired to make machines that added numbers. Turn dial A to indicate the first number, turn dial B to indicate the second, and if the copper paths behind the panel had been correctly platted, the lightbulb that came on would be the very one labeled with the proper answer. (And if you made a mistake and didnt feel like redoing the wires, you could just move around the tags.) Rig the machine another way and you could subtract or multiply. Wire up the "Reasoning Machine" described on page 25 of the guide and turning switch A to indicate "All fighter pilots are bomber pilots" and switch B to "No bomber pilots are jet pilots" would light the bulb for "No fighter pilots are jet pilots." QED. A syllogism (and a reminder that something can be logical but not true). It was all terribly anticlimactic. Only years later would I realize that an utterly profound idea was slowly insinuating itself into my head: a computer is indeed just a box with a bunch of switches. The Geniac was "semiautomatic," as the manual put it: You had to turn the dials by hand to light the lights. And to "reprogram" the machine, you had to unscrew nuts with the "spintite" and shift the wires around. But suppose that some of the bulbs were replaced with little motors. When activated by the proper combination of settings, the motors could turn switches on other Geniacs, which would cause the dials on still other Geniacs to spin. All kinds of elaborations were possible. Data could be fed into a glorified Geniac not with clunky wooden rotary dials but with cards or paper tape punched with holes arranged in the proper patterns. Read like Braille by metallic fingers, the holes would cause electrical connections to be made. Instead of flashlight bulbs, the circuits could ignite phosphorescent dots on a video screen-which is really just an array of thousands of tiny lights. In the computers modern incarnation, mechanical parts have been replaced by millions of microscopic transistors, minuscule switches etched onto the surfaces of silicon chips. Data are stored as invisible magnetic spots on spinning disks. But the basic idea is the same. Only remnants of my Geniac survive. Going through a closet recently, I found a box of old electronic junk. There, sitting atop a partially dissected radio chassis and other relics of the vacuum-tube age, were three of the old dials. Two still had labels-"Candidate A: Popularity," "Candidate A: Campaign Effort"-handwritten in black ink on strips of surgical adhesive tape. I had apparently tried to make a machine to predict election outcomes. I couldnt find the old manual anywhere. The reason I can quote from it (and the advertisement), reigniting old memories, is because I found the information in minutes on the World Wide Web. (I also found a Geniac kit on eBay, which was auctioned off for more than $400, twenty times its original price.) Im still astonished by the speed with which data course through the great skein of computers called the Internet. But it is comforting to know that for all its complexity, the Net is just a bunch of Geniacs chattering at each other, twisting each others dials. On page 37 of "Simple Electric Brain Machines and How to Make Them" came what was intended to be the climax: instructions for how to make a Geniac that pl Details ISBN0375726187 Author George Johnson Short Title SHORTCUT THROUGH TIME VINTAGE Pages 224 Edition Description Vintage Books Language English ISBN-10 0375726187 ISBN-13 9780375726187 Media Book Format Paperback Illustrations Yes Year 2004 Series Vintage Subtitle The Path to the Quantum Computer DOI 10.1604/9780375726187 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2004-02-10 NZ Release Date 2004-02-10 US Release Date 2004-02-10 UK Release Date 2004-02-10 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2004-02-10 Imprint Vintage Books DEWEY 004 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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