When we think of Silicon Valley today, our minds conjure social networks and software companies rather than the material after which the valley was named. Yet the internet, the cloud, social media, and the entire digital world only exist because engineers have learned to control the most minute movement of electrons as they race across slabs of silicon. “Big tech” wouldn’t exist if the cost of processing and remembering 1s and 0s hadn’t fallen by a billionfold in the past half century.
