Neil Gershenfeld

And so with a group of core colleagues that included Joe Jacobson, Ike Triang, Scott Manalis, we launched CBA.

How's that possible?

A well-equipped research lab has the sort of tools we're talking about, but they're segregated in different places.

They're typically also run by technicians where you then have an account and a project and you charge.

All of these tools are essentially...

when you don't know what you're doing, not when you do know what you're doing, in that they're when you need to work across length scales, where we don't, once projects are running in this facility, we don't charge for time, you don't make a formal proposal to schedule, and the users really run the tools, and it's for work that's kind of inchoate that needs to span these disciplines and length scales.

And so, you know,

Work in the project today, work in CBA today ranges from developing zeptojoule electronics for the lowest power computing to micromachining diamond to take million, 10 million RPM bearings for molecular spectroscopy studies up to exploring robots to build hundred meter structures in space.

Sure, so viewed from one direction,

what we're talking about is a crazy random seeming of almost unrelated projects.

But if you rotate 90 degrees, it's really just a core thought over and over again, just very literally how bits and atoms relate, just going from digital to physical in many different domains.

But it's really just the same idea over and over again.

So to understand the biggest things,

Let me go back to bring in now Shannon as well as Van Neumann.

Claude Shannon.

Yeah.

So what is digital?

The casual obvious answer is digital in one and zero, but that's wrong.

There's a much deeper answer, which is Claude Shannon is,

at MIT wrote the best master's thesis ever.