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No room for Steve Jobs at the top of Mount Nikon

Posted on 14 Feb 2012 at 09:40

There are many higher on the list of Dick Pountain's tech heroes than Steve Jobs

It should be no surprise to regulars of PC Pro if I admit to being agnostic with respect to the cult of Jobsianism. Agnostic rather than atheist, because I did greatly admire some of Steve Jobs’ qualities, most particularly his taste for great design and his uncanny skill at divining what people would want if they saw it, rather than what they want right now.

But, I found Jobs’ penchant for proprietary standards, monopoly pricing, patent trolling and “walled-garden” paternalism repugnant – and to judge from Walter Isaacson’s biography, I wouldn’t have cared to drink beer or drop acid with him. In my own secular theology, Jobs will now occupy a plateau on the lower slopes of Mount Nikon (which used to be called Mount Olympus before the Gods dumped the franchise in protest at that accounting scandal), alongside other purveyors of beautiful implements, such as Leo Fender and Enzo Ferrari.

Who would I place higher up the slopes of Mount Nikon? Certainly Dennis Ritchie (father of the C language) and John McCarthy (father of Lisp), both of whom died within a week or so of Jobs, and whose work helped lead programming out of its early primitivism.

I found Jobs’ penchant for proprietary standards, monopoly pricing, patent trolling and walled-garden paternalism repugnant

On a far higher ledge, pretty close to the summit, would be physicist Richard Feynman. I’ve just finished reading his 1985 book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, a collection of four lectures he gave in New Zealand and California explaining quantum electrodynamics.

The book amply demonstrates Feynman’s brilliance as a teacher who applied humour and inspired metaphors to explain the most difficult of subject, er, matter. He cleverly imagines a tiny stopwatch whose second hand represents the phase of a travelling photon, and through this device explains all the phenomena of optics more clearly than I’ve ever seen before.

What does this have to do with PCs? Having finished his book in a warm glow of new-found understanding, I was prompted to take down a book I’ve mentioned here before, by Carver Mead, the father of very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit technology, and an ex-student of Feynman’s at Caltech.

In his introduction, Mead offers an anecdote from the early 1960s, which includes these remarks: “My work on [electron] tunnelling was being recognised, and Gordon Moore (then at Fairchild), asked me whether tunnelling would be a major limitation on how small we could make transistors in an integrated circuit. That question took me on a detour to last nearly 30 years, but it also led me into another collaboration with Feynman, this time on the subject of computation.”

Mead presented their preliminary results in a 1968 lecture, and, “as I prepared for this event, I began to have serious doubts about my sanity. My calculations were telling me that, contrary to all the current lore in the field, we could scale down the technology such that everything got better.”

By 1971, Mead and Feynman were predicting Moore’s Law, from considerations of quantum physics. Now Utopian predictions about the potential power of quantum PCs are the flavour of this decade, but it’s less widely appreciated that our PCs already depend upon quantum physics: QED, and its sister discipline QCD (quantum chromodynamics), underlie all of physics, all of chemistry – all of everything.

The band gap of silicon that makes it a semiconductor and enables chips to work is already a quantum phenomenon. The first three of Feynman’s lectures in QED are mostly about photons, but his last chapter touches upon “the rest of physics”, including Pauli’s exclusion principle. Electrons are such touchy creatures that, at most, two of opposite spins can ever occupy the same state, a seemingly abstract principle that determines how atoms can combine – that’s to say, all of chemistry, cosmology, even biology. It’s why stone is hard and water is wet. Stars, planets, slugs, snails, puppy dog’s tails, all here thanks to the exclusion principle, which is therefore as good a candidate as any for the bounteous creative principle in my secular theology. Its dark sworn enemy is of course the second law of thermodynamics: in the end, entropy or chaos must always prevail.

It seems I’ve reinvented a polytheistic, materialistic version of Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion from around 600BC. At the centre of my theology stands cloud-capped Mount Nikon, its slopes teeming with minds who advanced human understanding such as Aristotle, Spinoza and Nietzsche, with ingenious scientists including Einstein and Feynman. And lower down, the talented crazies who gave us beautiful toys, such as Steve Jobs.

Author: Dick Pountain