{"id":36,"date":"2026-05-06T19:10:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T19:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesblog.rwu.me\/wp\/?p=36"},"modified":"2026-05-13T17:43:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T17:43:59","slug":"the-law-that-built-the-modern-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesblog.rwu.me\/wp\/2026\/05\/06\/the-law-that-built-the-modern-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Law That Built the Modern World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1965 a man named Gordon Moore made a prediction. He noticed that the number of transistors engineers could fit onto a computer chip was doubling roughly every two years. He figured that would probably keep going. It did. For about 60 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That observation became Moore’s Law and it’s arguably the most important economic force in the history of technology. Every time transistors got smaller, computers got faster and cheaper. Every time computers got faster and cheaper, new industries became possible. The internet, smartphones, streaming, social media, cloud computing, none of it happens without Moore’s Law quietly running in the background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As someone interested in entrepreneurship this is one of the most useful frameworks of knowledge and interpretation I’ve come across in this class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The numbers are genuinely hard to believe.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first transistor built at Bell Labs in 1947 was roughly the size of your hand. Today a single Apple M3 chip contains around 25 billion transistors in a piece of silicon smaller than a postage stamp. I have an M3. Absolutely insane to think about. NVIDIA’s new Blackwell GPU pushes that to 208 billion transistors on a single chip that costs around $40,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To put that in perspective, if cars had improved at the same rate as transistors since 1971 a car today would go 300,000 miles per hour and cost less than a penny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The metric prefixes we use to talk about this stuff tell the story on their own. We went from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes in a few decades. Your phone probably has 256 gigabytes of storage. A single gigabyte is a billion bytes. Each byte is 8 bits. Each bit is one transistor firing on or off. The scale is almost impossible to visualize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the law is slowing down.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re now building transistors just a few atoms wide. At that scale the normal rules of physics start to break. Electrons don’t behave the way they do at larger scales. Heat becomes a massive problem. The cost of building the facilities to manufacture these chips has become so enormous that only a handful of companies in the world can do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Moore’s Law isn’t dead but it’s not what it was. The easy doublings are behind us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what comes next?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few different directions are being explored right now. Quantum computing uses the properties of subatomic particles to process information in ways classical computers fundamentally can’t. Photonic chips like those being developed by a company called Lightmatter use light instead of electricity to move data, which is faster and uses far less energy. Vaire Computing is working on chips that are nearly reversible at a physical level, meaning they lose almost no energy as heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physicist Michio Kaku thinks the next revolution is AI combined with quantum computing. He might be right. Nobody knows exactly what the next curve looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The entrepreneurship relationship is quite obvious here!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moore’s Law created predictable waves of opportunity. Every time computing power got cheaper a new category of business became possible that wasn’t before. The people who saw those waves coming and built at the right moment made fortunes. The people who waited too long got disrupted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now we’re at an inflection point. Classical silicon is hitting its limits. New computing paradigms are emerging. That gap between what’s ending and what’s beginning is exactly where the next generation of important companies will be built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The question worth asking isn’t what computers can do today. It’s what becomes possible when computing gets ten times cheaper and a hundred times faster again. Because if history is any guide, that’s coming. Just maybe not on the same schedule as before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grammar checked with Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6, Anthropic, May 2026, claude.ai\/chat). Prompt: “Please check the following blog post for any grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Do not change the meaning, tone, or structure of the writing. Only fix errors.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/terms\/m\/mooreslaw.asp<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.waferworld.com\/post\/how-small-can-transistors-get<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Transistor_count<\/a>
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2CijJaNEh_Q<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9XK-fBkWsvs<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How many billions of transistors in your iPhone processor?<\/a><\/blockquote>