All quotes from
Michio's book
Your
cellphone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed
two astronauts on the moon.
When
you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip that sings “Happy
Birthday” to you. Remarkably, that chip
has more computer power than all the Allied forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt might have
killed to get that chip.
The
Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military
supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.
Gravity: the force is maddeningly weak. For example,
it takes the entire mass of the earth to keep pieces of paper on my desk. However, by brushing a comb through my hair, I
can pick up these pieces of paper, overwhelming the force of the planet
earth. The electrons in my comb are more
powerful than the gravitational pull of the entire planet.
Relativity... our alarm clock wakes us up one day at 8am, and
we decide to spend the morning in bed instead of going to work. Although it appears that we are doing nothing
by loafing in bed, we are actually tracing out a world line. Take a sheet of graph paper, and on the
horizontal scale put “distance” and on the vertical scale put “time”. If we simply lie in bed from 8 to 12, our
world line is a straight vertical line.
We went 4 hours into the future but travelled no distance. … Now let’s say that we finally get out of
bed at noon and arrive at work at 1pm. Our world line becomes slanted because
we are moving in space as well as time. … One conclusion is immediate. Our world line never really begins or ends.
Even when we die, the world lines of the molecules in our bodies keep
going. These molecules may disperse into
the air or soil but they will trace out their own never-ending world
lines. Similarly, when we are born, the
world lines of the molecules coming from our mother coalesce into a baby. At no point do world lines break off or
appear from nothing. …From this point of
view, a human being can be defined as a temporary collection of world lines of
molecules. These world lines were
scattered before we were born, came together to form our bodies, and will
rescatter after we die.
