A Transistor for Sound Points Toward Whole New Electronics | Hacker News Reader

A Transistor for Sound Points Toward Whole New Electronics

spectrum.ieee.org

102 pointsgraderjs35 comments

I recently read “To The Digital Age” (would recommend) which covers the history of the transistor and I left with a few takeaways:

- New transistor architectures can matter a lot (MOSFETs are why we enjoy the benefits of Moores law, BJTs wouldnt have gotten us here)

- It took an entire industry decades to mobilize the tooling, manufacturing, art, and science of a single architecture (MOS) even with related tools for BJTs

- Once an architecture shows promise, even giants like IBMs and its infinite funding cant fight against the tides

- Even when some people know an architecture is promising, organizational politics can prevent work on it

So, new architectures are always interesting but they have a huge slew technology transfer problems. But if theyre better in some way, they can find a niche and over time (decades) may turn into the next big thing. But I wouldnt hold my breath.

This documentary by PBS claims William Shockley was an ego maniac who stole a lot of the credit for the transistor from his subordinates John Bardeen and Walter Brattain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4XknGqr3Bo

This is getting to be a trope - "what you knew is wrong, the guy who is generally given credit was actually an evil bastard who oppressed these other team members who did the lion's share of the work."

I'm not sure we need sacred cows and I have no dog in a fight for credit for transistor, mouse, DNA, electricity or anything else, but the constant demand for deconstruction - "everything you know is wrong" - gets a bit wearisome.

It rings true to me. I designed a piece of software that runs a 25 million dollar business line at a major corp. The moment I was done I was shown the door so my superiors could take credit.

I was the first team member of a major linux distribution, I named it and designed a critical portion of the build system. The self-promoters quickly took credit for my contributions.

I have a patent for a silly invention, but I am listed as the last inventor. The VP of the company is listed as the first inventor having had nothing to do at all with it.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

It's not the fault of people deconstructing history today that a previous generation gave credit for the work of groups of people to the most famous individual involved.

Welcome to postmodernism?

Isn't it more poststructural? E.g. instead of some well defined "this one person invented X" narrative structure being the way society happens, the reality is more often nuanced (and badly recorded) with multiple personal involvements with the new concept.

Though I think this is more just the subject of 'history' and figuring out what exactly happened.

Some people seem to get defensive when they find it the history they have been taught is challenged. Why not be wearisome about the flawed system/culture that keeps promulgating half truths?

> Isn't it more poststructural?

I'm not an expert, so it might be. Although I tend to think that postmodern is a rejection of any objective authority truth. Whereas from what I understand about poststructuralists, they still believe there's some sort of Truth you can attain, they just disagree with structuralists about how to get there. And in this case I tend to feel it's more of a post-modern "tearing down anything that seems like an authority truth" than anything else.

> Though I think this is more just the subject of 'history' and figuring out what exactly happened.

Agree.

> Some people seem to get defensive when they find it the history they have been taught is challenged. Why not be wearisome about the flawed system/culture that keeps promulgating half truths?

Agree. but I think you can replace some people with most people. And it's very understandable to feel scared and angry when someone challenges what you think is true about reality.

Or simply boring. Telling a more nuanced story of credit is one thing, but continually seeking new angles to further deconstruct for its own sake starts to feel unproductive after a few rounds.

It wasn’t this guy, Bob, it was this team; it wasn’t this team, it was really their moms who gave them a healthy breakfast each morning; it wasn’t really their moms, it was the vision and leadership of this guy Bob who was very troubled; it wasn’t this guy Bob but a woman and another guy on his team who were robbed of credit despite their struggles; it wasn’t the woman and the guy, the sugar industry lobby conspired to keep you from knowing the real story; damn, but this guy bob was cool; Bob was enabled by an industry supported by child labor.

By unproductive I mean not adding much of substance but looking for rando new angles to make the story “interesting”. One of those angles comes with the accusation that you’ve been a willing victim of perpetuating untruth but here’s the REAL story.

And I fully realize I’m old man yelling at cloud here. This is the way of popular culture story telling, but there’s some unspoken bargain in the dynamic with the audience that I feel is a bit insulting. That history need spicy new angles or interpretation to be of interest; that these layers are so often pitifully thin takes; that you stick around long enough you see it go full circle more than once. It’s a distraction from real learning.

Or old woman, I guess, yelling at cloud.

Comment is WIP. I may add more comments in or below as I think about it.

> One of those angles comes with the accusation that you’ve been a willing victim of perpetuating untruth but here’s the REAL story.

Totally. Well identified. I'd always been dimly aware that this was a thing but your words really brought it into focus for me. Thank you. Sometimes discussions on hn can really be enlightening.

Thinking more about this I had the inspired thought that perhaps this is about a sort of civilizational decline in that instead of coming up with new stories, (inspirationally new tales of new things) we are just like a snake eating its own tail, like endlessly copying (a copy of a copy of a copy, in the fight club lingo), like the criticism that we hurl at the East (they are endlessly copying things) but in fact we're just endlessly copying things in our in our own culture. rather than delivering new, We're just constantly deconstructing.

and that might be a symptom or even a cause of the sort of decline that we're in...

Very interesting reflections and nice to be inspired by your comment to draw these two points together: the sort of civilizational decline of the West, and this trope about endlessly deconstructing histories that we're obviously engaging in.

Your complaining about something that hasn't happened here? Ok

But telling a valid story about something that definitely happens (the seemingly endless cycle of deconstruction in cultural storytelling) in the culture. All the time. That's definitely interesting, I guess.

Tho I get if you don't find that interesting. But that seems to be willfully looking away from something that's happening in the culture. okay

Oh it's interesting, but I have limited time in my life, and I don't think the patterns you note arise in this instance or are indicative of poststructuralism in general.

Precisely...i was saying it was postmodernism not poststructuralism...I'm no expert. It's what I think tho.

I tend to think that's exactly what's happening here. What you may be perceiving as an academic exercise (based on earlier comment), I see as merely SOP for the entertainment industry to dust off old stories and making us all dumber in the process.

But it literally exactly didn't happen here.

Is that ISBN 9780801868092?

Yea, thats the one

> it is suspected, Potential, scientists at Harvard have now invented and simulated

So another hype. I thought IEEE are serious people eveb if they charge a lot of money for their publications. You can simulate _anything_. All you need is a simulator and a model. Reality is a bit different.

God no they are a shit show. Having been an EE years ago I stopped reading any journals and research. 99.9% of it is garbage which is engineered to sell attention rather than a better future.

Anything worth giving attention to turns up in EDN when a product comes to market after someone took it serious enough to actually invest in it. Then you pay attention.

My favourite recent thing is chip scale atomic clocks: https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency...

You can actually buy them!m

Edit: the worst garbage is actually IET’s E&T Magazine. That’s horse dung.

I didn't really understand IEEE until I realized that they're more of an academic society than a professional society, despite what their marketing suggests. The academia mill is a weird way to fund training engineers for industry, and IEEE is just a forum for it.

> You can actually buy them!

For $5,200.

I wonder how many they sell. They would be useful in things like rangefinding and positioning (and maybe encrypted packet comms).

Sounds like a military market.

They almost entirely are military market. A chipscale atomic clock is really only good for GPS-denied environments whether that means a UAV looking for a jammer or some very small device underwater that doesn't have room for a traditional rack mount time and reference frequency source. Space (civil and military) is another application where you may have a satellite that is not in optimal range of GPS satellites and may need a backup reference. There could be some mining and petro industry applications but again, something deep underwater or underground. Anything other situation and you'd have clear sky for GPS.

Actually they’re $1750 for the module which is quite affordable if your hobby is timenuttery.

http://www.leapsecond.com/

Fair ‘nuff. I probably misread the ordering page (renders like crap on mobile).

In particular you need to know what to simulate, because when you simulate you leave lots of things outside the simulation.

The only thing that proves that you made a good work ignoring those things is prototyping on the real world.

Without that it is just vaporware.

Do you suppose that modellers are unaware of the differences?

I don't think they are not aware. But for fame, they ignore it.

Controlling the transistor requires an intermediate step converting the sound to heat. In my book, this isn't really an 'acoustic' transistor. Phononic transistors have been proposed though[0]. Phononic transistors have been built, albeit with some magnets, but merely for their nonlinear mechanical properties[1]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.00679

[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/114/18/4603

A heat-activated switch for sound? Is this extremely slow, or what?

I think the idea is they hypothesize a new way to build electronic transistors, and the equations it relies on happen to have an exact counterpart in sound, so they built a sound-based one as a kind of scale model.

I thought that was part of it, but with s/electronic/photonic/g

Wow, I wonder if topological materials exist for heat? It would be cool to have a super efficient heat exchange or deliver heat to a distant source...

very interesting and innovative. great work.

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