Neil Gershenfeld

speaker

1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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In his master's thesis, he invented our modern notion of digital logic.

Where it came from was Vannevar Bush was a grand old man at MIT.

He created the post-war research establishment that led to the National Science Foundation.

And he made an important mistake, which we can talk about.

But he also made the differential analyzer, which was the last great analog computer.

So it was a room full of gears and pulleys.

And the longer it ran, the worse the answer was.

And Shannon worked on it as a student and he got so annoyed in his master's thesis he invented digital logic.

But he then went on to Bell Labs and what he did there was communication was beginning to expand.

There was more demand for phone lines.

And so there's a question about how many phone lines you could, phone messages you could send down a wire.

And you could try to just make it better and better.

He asked a question nobody had asked, which is rather than make it better and better, what's the limit to how good it can be?

And he proved a couple things, but one of the main things he proved was a threshold theorem

for channel capacity.

And so what he showed was my voice to you right now is coming as a wave through sound.

And the further you get, the worse it sounds.

But people watching this are getting it as packets of data in a network.

When the computer they're watching this gets the packet of information, it can detect and correct an error.

And what Shannon showed is if the noise in the cable to the people watching this is above a threshold, they're doomed.

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