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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

> He had also seen into the mathematical heart of quantum mechanics — that subtle, far from intuitive account of the ultra-small world within atoms — developing concepts without which our 21st century’s internet economy would never have arisen.

How did quantum mechanics influence the "internet economy"?

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Well, where QM really comes into play the most is probably in the chip fabrication industry, all the nanometer-scale processes involve rely heavily on that theory. If you get an applied physics / quantum mechanics PhD from a leading research university today you can get a very well paid job designing and troubleshooting the machines that go into a chip fabrication setup.

Claiming it wouldn't be possible with JvN is a bit much, though. It was Heisenberg who developed matrix mechanics the most, along with people like PAM Dirac. JvN put the mathematics on a firmer footing, but claiming he should be viewed like Einstein, it's kind of silly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics

Quantum Mechanics led to the development of nuclear weapons which led to the development of the packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war. Internet Protocol led to the development of the internet economy.

> packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war

Source please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

Wikipedia link basically says, that ARPANET's resistance to nuclear war is a false rumor.

The Wikipedia page quotes one Director of DARPA (Stephen J. Lukasik):

The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.

And Vint Cerf is quoted elsewhere [1] saying:

the original ARPAnet project was built to share computing resources among all the computer science departments. It was not built _solely_ to deal with nuclear attack, so it was a resource-sharing system

[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense/2010/05/vint-cerf-exp...

Well, not really. The atomic bomb didn't really require quantum mechanics to build. Certainly not the gun bomb. That's two hunks of enriched uranium forced together. Implosion was tougher, but mostly a hydrodynamics problem. H-bombs required much more theory.

Yes, you probably don't need QM to design a gun bomb, but to build one you do need 64kg of enriched U-235 and for that you need a Manhattan Project and for that you need Einstein to write a letter to the President and for that you need Bohr & Wheeler to write "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" in 1939 and confidently explain that it could work and for that you need QM.

And they could only produce a single gun bomb. The other one had to be Plutonium, meaning it had to have a neutron trigger, IIRC that involved Bohr. It took two bombs to end the war.

Transistors are an implementation of QM. Without transistors…

Lasers are what get large amounts of information from A to B

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