science

Synthesis: Intelligence Is Expensive We've traveled from the compute ceiling to Landauer's limit, from the brain's 20 watts to organoid wetware, from neuromorphic chips to nuclear plants to fusion dreams, from tungsten mines to reversible computing. Now let's pull it together. What

Reversible Computing: Escaping Landauer We've talked about Landauer's limit—the thermodynamic floor on computation that says every bit erased releases heat. At room temperature, that's about 2.8 × 10⁻²¹ joules per bit. Tiny, but non-negotiable. Physics doesn't care about your engineering. But

Fusion Dreams: Tokamaks Meet Training Runs "Fusion is thirty years away, and always has been." This joke has circulated among physicists for decades. It captures the field's history of perpetual promise and perpetual delay. Since the 1950s, fusion—the process that powers the sun—has been

Tungsten and the Chip Supply Chain The compute ceiling isn't just about energy. It's also about stuff—the physical materials that go into making chips. And one of the most critical, least discussed materials is tungsten. Tungsten is everywhere in semiconductors. It's in the

Nuclear for AI: Why Data Centers Want Reactors In September 2024, Microsoft announced it was restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Yes, that Three Mile Island—the site of America's worst commercial nuclear accident in 1979. The company signed a twenty-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy,

Neuromorphic Chips: Silicon Learns from Neurons If you can't grow a brain in a dish—or don't want to deal with the complications of keeping tissue alive—there's another option: build silicon that acts like a brain. This is the neuromorphic computing approach. Instead