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By one widely cited estimate, about 13 sextillion transistors (13 followed by 21 zeros) had been made by 2018, more than any other object in history. A transistor is a tiny electronic switch, and computer chips are built from billions of them.

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The first transistor was built at Bell Labs in the United States in 1947 by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working in William Shockley's group; the three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Transistors replaced the fragile glass valves of early electronics. A transistor switches an electric current on or off, and those on and off states are the 1s and 0s computers work with. Almost all transistors made today are of a type called the MOSFET, invented at Bell Labs in 1959 by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng. The 13 sextillion figure is an estimate by the industry analyst Jim Handy, published by the Computer History Museum in 2018. A single advanced chip can now hold more than 100 billion transistors, and billions more are made every day.

Türkçe oku
Sıkça aktarılan bir tahmine göre 2018'e kadar yaklaşık 13 milyar trilyon (13'ün ardından 21 sıfır) transistör üretildi; tarihte başka hiçbir nesne bu kadar çok üretilmedi. Transistör minicik bir elektronik anahtardır ve bilgisayar çipleri milyarlarca transistörden oluşur.

İlk transistörü 1947'de ABD'deki Bell Laboratuvarları'nda John Bardeen ile Walter Brattain yaptı. İkisi William Shockley'nin ekibinde çalışıyordu ve üçü 1956 Nobel Fizik Ödülü'nü paylaştı. Transistörler, ilk elektronik aygıtlardaki kırılgan cam vakum tüplerinin yerini aldı. Bir transistör elektrik akımını açıp kapar; bu açık ve kapalı durumlar, bilgisayarların kullandığı 1'ler ve 0'lardır. Bugün üretilen transistörlerin neredeyse hepsi MOSFET denen türdendir; bu türü 1959'da yine Bell Laboratuvarları'nda Mohamed Atalla ile Dawon Kahng geliştirdi. 13 milyar trilyonluk tahmin, sektör analisti Jim Handy'ye ait; ABD'deki Bilgisayar Tarihi Müzesi (Computer History Museum) bu hesabı 2018'de yayımladı. Tek bir gelişmiş çipte artık 100 milyardan fazla transistör bulunabiliyor; her gün de milyarlarcası daha üretiliyor.

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Background reading: Transistor
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WonderHistory

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In the mid-1970s the Australian-born biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, working at Yale, found that chromosome ends carry a short DNA “word” repeated many times; in humans it is TTAGGG. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for showing how telomeres, and an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds them, protect chromosomes. Each time most body cells divide, the copying machinery cannot quite reach the very end, so a little telomere is lost; when it gets too short, the cell stops dividing, which is why telomeres are often called a clock. But it is a poor clock for comparing people or species: mice have much longer telomeres than humans yet live only two or three years, and telomere length varies widely between people from birth. Many scientists therefore doubt commercial tests that claim to read your “biological age” from them.

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The atomic clocks on GPS satellites run about 38 millionths of a second a day faster than clocks on the ground, an effect predicted by Einstein's theories of relativity. Left uncorrected, the drift would put your position out by about 11 km within a single day.

A GPS receiver, such as the one in your phone, works out where it is by timing signals from several satellites orbiting about 20,200 km up. Radio signals travel about 300 metres in a microsecond, a millionth of a second, so even tiny clock errors matter. Relativity pulls the clocks apart in two ways. Special relativity says moving clocks run slow: travelling at almost 4 km a second, the satellite clocks lose about 7 microseconds a day. General relativity says clocks in weaker gravity run fast: high above Earth they gain about 46. The net gain is about 38 microseconds a day. So before launch, each satellite clock is set to run slightly slow, at 10.22999999543 million cycles a second instead of 10.23 million, and in orbit it keeps step with clocks on the ground.

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WonderTechnology

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The experiments were done at the University of California, Berkeley, in Clarke's group; Martinis was his doctoral student and Devoret a postdoctoral researcher. Absolute zero, −273.15 °C, is the lowest temperature possible. At the heart of the circuit was a Josephson junction: two superconductors, metals that carry current with no resistance when very cold, separated by an insulating layer only a few atoms thick. Vast numbers of electrons moved together as if they were one particle. The team saw two signs of quantum behaviour: the circuit escaped from a trapped state by tunnelling, slipping through an energy barrier it could not climb over, and it absorbed microwave energy only in fixed steps, or quanta, as an atom does. Circuits of this kind are now the qubits, the basic units of information, in the superconducting quantum computers built by companies such as Google and IBM.

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