The Exciting Times We Live In
I won’t pretend to understand half of what is in this article, but there is some cool stuff going on. Apparently a new type of simple electronic has been invented at HP. It has been known that this element existed for 30 or 40 years now but it has just now been possible to make one. This bugger is known as the memristor. It has the property of changing resistance once power is put through it. It will then remember its new state until energy is passed through it again. Apparently people have just been looking at things from the wrong angle.
Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge,” said Chua. “The situation is analogous to what is called “Aristotle’s Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration–the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic textbooks have been teaching using the wrong variables–voltage and charge–explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies. What they should have been teaching is the relationship between changes in voltage, or flux, and charge
Pretty slick stuff. Can you imagine all the new devices this discovery will enable? I call first dibs on the 100 yottabyte inner brain implant!
The memristor is our salvation, because it works better and better as you make it smaller and smaller,” said Chua. “The era of nanoscale electronics will be enabled by the memristor. This is not just an invention, it is a basic scientific discovery. It has always been there–we just had to face these nanoscale problems to realize its importance.
–Stan Williams