The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you cannot know both the position and velocity of any particle. This may sound counterintuitive, but at the atomic level you simply cannot know where the electron is, so it can never be confined precisely in an ultrathin wire or layer and it necessarily leaks out, causing the circuit to short-circuit. We will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 4, when we analyze nanotechnology. For the rest of this chapter, we will assume that physicists have found a successor to silicon power, but that computer power grows at a much slower pace than before.
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