High Energy Physics Practical Utility 101
of electric energy. Only big corporations, like the United States army -or
big research laboratories or big companies-, could be able to afford them.
It was the year of 1952.
The before mentioned situation changed. W. Shockley, winner of the
Nobel prize in 1956, conjectured that the use of transistor could change
computers shape. Also uses, applicability ambits, operation energy, and
dexterity to utilize it. It happened so. And something else also occurred.
For transistor can be reduced in size, its possibilities are enormous. The
transistors can be packed and connected, by millions, in a cubic millimeter.
Physicists interconnected them right there. With them, physicists built
electronic memories, integrated circuits, tri-dimensional integrated circuits,
etc. And with those gears, physicists made clocks, televisions, etc., but
mainly computers. Computers are the core of all automatic machines.
The main attributes of computers are the speed to process information
and the capacity to store it. All developments of computation have been
made in this direction. Additionally computers got size and consumption
of power reduction. The first computer lacked of memory. It was the
MANIAC I. And the year was 1952. It occupied the volume of a big desk.
It did no see the market.
Latest computers in market have 3.6 gigaHertz in clock sp eed, some mil-
lion of units of RAM memory, and occupy the volume of regular folder three
hundred page book. They operate, continuously for more than 4 hours, with
a 12 Volts cigarette box size battery. They have infrared communication
port, fax modem, drive for diskettes and CD, sound stereophonic system,
DVD player, and hard disk up to 100 GB.
With a high capacity of computation and storing information comput-
ers, other scientific areas are developed. Limited memory and limited speed
are not big problems any more, as they used to be. New technologies ap-
pear. New science branches. For example, molecular biology, molecular
chemistry, computational physics, etc. The very long calculations, that
appear when quantum mechanics is applied to a many b ody physical sys-
tem, are not big problems any more. They can be made, now in these
days, in a few hours in a medium size book computer. And developments
in computation and communication continue at accelerated pace in these
days, integrating huge amounts of computers in one big global network that
could work as a single computer.