And the fact is, that's the driving force behind a lot of what we do. Feynman may be the first non-biologist in fact who publicly drew analogies between manmade machines and the natural processes that drive the core engines of living organisms. Though he didn't dwell on the topic, Feynman also spoke of DNA's remarkable power in storing massive amounts of information about how to assemble a living, breathing life form. This almost spooky phenomenon presents the ultimate challenge to legions of scientists and engineers who labor to shrink memory devices in computers. But crude as it is by natural standards, the effort has nonetheless revolutionized society.
Computers keep collapsing in size like a Chinese shell game, while their power steadily mounts.
On the average, say computer trade magazines, the capacity of memory storage devices is doubling every 18 months. You bet, says von Moln r. But so far, no one seems to know exactly where the physical limits of memory storage technology as it's presently configured lie, he said. Basically, magnetic particles individual bits of matter that hold the all-important magnetic orientation that collectively constitute words, numbers and images are crammed together in the highest numbers possible in the least amount of space on the surface of recording media. Such crowding is mainly limited to the size of each particle the smaller the particles, the higher the density, and thus the more useful the computer at least up to a point.