The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

by Simon Winchester

if an observer on the ground could establish with precision the position of a satellite in space, then the opposite, the numerical reciprocal, could be true as well.

Roger Easton,

shooting down in 1983 of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet fighters

There are now more transistors at work on this planet (some 15 quintillion, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000) than there are leaves on all the trees in the world.

John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain (left to right), joint winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the “transistor effect.” Bardeen would win again, in 1972, for his work on semiconductors, becoming one of only four people to have won the Nobel twice.

Shockley

Fairchild

Jean Hoerni came up with the idea that allowed a coating of silicon oxide on top of a pure silicon crystal to be used as an integral part of the transistor,

Robert Noyce.

integrated circuits.

Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce—the

10 particles of just one-tenth of a micron per cubic meter, and no particles of any size larger than that.

five million times less clean.

seven billion transistors on one circuit,

extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, and at a specific wavelength of 13.5 billionths of a meter.

LIGO can help to measure that vast distance to within the width of a single human hair. And that’s precision.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Perfection is the child of time.

Charles Sanders Peirce

cadmium’s

krypton-86