No need for anyone to throw me a bone. I was taught to build dinosaurs without them, with paper - remembering that paper is just wood.
I am not making this clear. I see no limits in the materials, only a limit in our minds, therefore in our "methods." Materials and methods. Materials and methods.
Flashback to the 80's, actually it began in the 70's, the worry about the theoretical limit regarding IC (integrated circuit) densities. In 1965 Moore's Law predicted the doubling of the amount of transistors on an IC every year. In 1970 he revised that estimate to every two years which has held true even now. Because of that prediction, it was predicted that the technology would hit a wall because of the physical limitations of it. Just how small would we be able to make transistors before "small enough isn't good enough?" Well, that first wall was predicted in the 90's. Then 2000, then 2013 it was expected to slow considerably. It hasn't.
Back around the middle of 2000 a French company funded projects to push back the limits of miniaturization of semiconductors, in 2006 creating the 45 nm fabrication technology.
In 2007 the company was working on developing 32nm and even 22nm nodes. Developing even smaller transistors would have been a boon to business, but many naysayers thought it to be wasted R&D because 32nm scale is highly affected by quantum mechanical effects. But the company persevered and in their research solved the problem regarding the reduction of the current leakage at the logic gate, by using hafnium based insulators rather than the traditional approach of using silicon dioxide.
Materials and methods. We are not limited by our materials, but by our minds, in not yielding the proper methods. Besides the imminent limitations implied by Moore's Law, computer technology is also threatened by the *Beckenstein bound. Which is also an important aspect in my study of black holes.
My point is that human resourcefulness is only limited by the human mind. Materials and methods.
The resourceful engineer does not aim to defeat the second law of thermodynamics. He simply erects scaffolding about it and designs around it.
****** *
In January 1995, the Digital Alpha 21164 microprocessor had 9.3 million transistors. This 64-bit processor was a technological spearhead at the time, even if the circuit's market share remained average. Six years later, a state of the art microprocessor contained more than 40 million transistors. It is theorised that, with further miniaturisation, by 2015 these processors should contain more than 15 billion transistors, and by 2020 will be in molecular-scale production, where each molecule can be individually positioned.
In 2003, Intel predicted the end would come between 2013 and 2018 with 16 nanometer manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunnelling, although others suggested chips could just get larger, or become layered.[72] In 2008 it was noted that for the last 30 years, it has been predicted that Moore's law would last at least another decade.
Some see the limits of the law as being in the distant future. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman announced an ultimate limit of approximately 600 years in their paper,[73] based on rigorous estimation of total information-processing capacity of any system in the Universe, which is limited by the Bekenstein bound. On the other hand, based on first principles, there are predictions that Moore's law will collapse in the next few decades [20–40 years]".
*Bekenstein bound
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In physics, the Bekenstein bound is an upper limit on the entropy S, or information I, that can be contained within a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy—or conversely, the maximum amount of information required to perfectly describe a given physical system down to the quantum level.[1] It implies that the information of a physical system, or the information necessary to perfectly describe that system, must be finite if the region of space and the energy is finite. In computer science, this implies that there is a maximum information-processing rate (Bremermann's limit) for a physical system that has a finite size and energy, and that a Turing machine with finite physical dimensions and unbounded memory is not physically possible.
Origins
Bekenstein derived the bound from heuristic arguments involving black holes. If a system exists that violates the bound, i.e. by having too much entropy, Bekenstein argued that it would be possible to violate the second law of thermodynamics by lowering it into a black hole. In 1995, Ted Jacobson demonstrated that the Einstein field equations (i.e., general relativity) can be derived by assuming that the Bekenstein bound and the laws of thermodynamics are true.[5][6] However, while a number of arguments have been devised which show that some form of the bound must exist in order for the laws of thermodynamics and general relativity to be mutually consistent, the precise formulation of the bound has been a matter of debate.
Examples:
Black holes
It happens that the Bekenstein-Hawking Entropy of three-dimensional black holes exactly saturates the bound. The bound is closely associated with black hole thermodynamics, the holographic principle and the covariant entropy bound of quantum gravity, and can be derived from a conjectured strong form of the latter.
Human brain
An average human brain has a mass of 1.5 kg and a volume of 1260 cm³. If the brain is approximated by a sphere then the radius will be 6.7 cm.
The informational Bekenstein bound will and represents the maximum information needed to perfectly recreate an average human brain down to the quantum level. This means that the number of states of the human brain must be less than...
The existence of the Bekenstein bound implies that the storage capacity of human brain is finite, although potentially very large, if constrained only by ultimate physical limits. This makes mind uploading possible from the point of view of quantum mechanics, provided that physicalism is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_boundhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_lawI do not see the second law of thermodynamics as a STOP sign.
I do not see the Beckenstein bound as a STOP sign.
They are merely Yield signs.I am not arguing the limits of our current technology imposed by any theoretical considerations. Simply that
any limits, theoretical, physical, psychological or implied, are just limits of our mind, materials and methods. As an engineer, I was taught that. It has held true.
Methods and materials - SWM has unknowingly supplied the perfect example applied to a problem...
SWM wrote:We already know that Honorverse is not using physical lenses for grasers--they are using gravitic lenses which can be manipulated as much as you want.
Perfect example of the aforementioned problem solving solution of "methods and materials."
What do you know. Some resourceful engineer has seen fit to utilize gravity as a material and then incorporate it into a method to solve a problem.
I cannot stress this enough...
"A good engineer understands the limits of his materials. The best engineer understands that the limit is the materials. The successful engineer designs in or designs out the limits of the materials by removing the limits of the mind. The one that gets the job is neither. The hire goes to the dyslexic engineer that sees no limits, named TIM. MIT."
Adam Gerrick understood it for certain.
.
It is the only way we are obtaining the power levels we are currently. Multispectrum frequency and opposing phase are being pumped through a lens. Each frequency interacts differently with Bragg filters etc and ultimately the lens in question. Combined via prism. Literally.