Chapter 9: The Modern World

The main topic of this chapter is the Transistor and how it has changed the world since its invention in 1947.

Fun Facts about transistors:

• You can buy over 100,000 transistors for the cost of a single grain of rice
• There are over a billion transistors in one cell phone
• The amount of resistors manufactured in the world each year is one hundred times the total number of grains of rice consumed each year by the world's population

Jeff Forshaw and Brian Cox state that "it is probably not overstating things to say that the transistor is the most important invention of the last 100 years."

Logic gates are the reason why transistors have changed the world. A logic gate has the ability to take two inputs and generate one output.

Here is a rather long video that goes into great depth about logic gates and transistors.

Here is a video that is about half as long (its still 15 minutes though so it is obvious that this topic is quite complicated and requires some time a patience to explain)

The gist of it all is that transistors are able to take two inputs and generate one output. These outputs generally are 1 or 0. Sound familiar?  This is one of the ways that quantum physics has transformed the world.