Watzke Megan - Magnitude

BOOKS

Powers of TenA Flipbook, Charles and Ray Eames, W. H. Freeman, 1998.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard P. Feynman, Addison Wesley, 1977.

WEBSITES

National Institute of Standards and Technology: www.nist.gov

Size, scale, and standards information.

The Physics Classroom: www.physicsclassroom.com
Physics tutorials and interactives.

Khan Academy: khanacademy.org
Educational videos on physics and scale.

The Physics Hypertextbook: physics.info
Online accessible textbook for physics.

Niel Brandts Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page: www2.astro.psu.edu/~niel/scales/scales.html
A thorough list of timelines and a scales of measurement.

Here, There, and Everywhere: hte.si.edu
Physics concepts (atomic collisions, electric discharge, etc.) across scales.

The Scale of the Universe: htwins.net/scale2/
Interactive application based on a Powers of Ten concept.

Powers of Ten: www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/powers-of-ten/
The Original Powers of Ten and the relative size of things in the universe.

Nikon Small World: www.nikonsmallworld.com
Some of the best microscopy images around.

T he concept of computingthat is, the act of making a calculationhas been around for millennia. From the Chinese and Roman abaci through the work of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, people have been using tools to help solve certain (often mathematical) problems.

Modern computation for many, however, started with the proliferation of the personal computer in the early 1980s, when the cost of personal computers began to drop significantly, putting them within financial reach of millions of households around the world.

The personal computers of the 1980s and 1990s were far bigger and bulkier than the computers, tablets, and smartphones we use today. And they were far less powerful, too. A typical nineties-era desktop computer had a hard drive that could store only 400 megabytes (MB) of data at a time. Computer users at the time kept information on floppy disks, accessed the nascent Internet through a primitive browser such as Netscape 1.0 or Mosaic (via a dial-up phone line), and had only a handful of web pages to browse.

Two decades later, the first-generation Apple Watch had 8 billion bytes, or 8 gigabytes (GB), of storage and boasts incredibly fast remote access to a wealth of data in the cloud, all from a very small machine worn on your wrist.

This breakneck pace of computational advances likely wouldnt have come as a surprise to Gordon Moore, one of the cofounders of Intel. In the mid 1960s Moore observed that certain aspects of technology (specifically, the integrated circuit or microchip that is ubiquitous in todays electronics, from computers to toys and from refrigerators to fire alarms) had been doubling in capacity each year since they were invented. He theorized that this increase would continue on indefinitely. Moores Law, as its now known, predicted that machine processing speeds double about every two years. And there are no signs of that frenetic pace slowing down.

Computing Power: Speed

One way to calculate the power of a computer is to calculate how quickly it can perform operations. In recent decades, there has been a dramatic rise both in capability and the need of computing power. Here are some examples of the leaps weve seen from the supercomputer market to the commercial and personal computing markets and where computing power is projected to go in the near future. Different actions or processes are treated differently when measuring computing speed; here we are comparing ballpark figures of computing power in instructions per second.