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Informationen zum Autor George Gilder publishes the Gilder Technology Report, a monthly newsletter, and is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, where he directs the program on high technology and public policy. He is a founder and contributor to ForbesASAP, a contributing editor of Forbes magazine, and a frequent writer for The Economist, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His previous books include Microcosm and Wealth and Poverty. He lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts. Klappentext The guru of high technology and a man whose "slightest utterance can move stocks" ("The Wall Street Journal") presents a clear! cogent vision of the future of telecommunications! what it will mean in readers everyday lives! and how savvy investors can get on the bandwagon today. Leseprobe Chapter 1: Maxwell's Rainbow "Nothing is too wonderful to be true." -- James Clerk Maxwell, discoverer of electromagnetism "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." -- Mae West The supreme abundance of the telecosm is the electromagnetic spectrum, embracing all the universe of vibrating electrical and magnetic fields, from power line pulses through light beams to cosmic rays. The scarcity that unlocks this abundance is the supreme scarcity in physical science: the absolute minimum time it takes to form an electromagnetic wave of a particular length. Set by the permeability of free space, this minimal span determines the speed of light. The discovery of electromagnetism, and its taming in a mathematical system, was the paramount achievement of the nineteenth century and the first step into the telecosm. The man who did it was the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In his honor, we will call the spectrum Maxwell's rainbow. Today most of world business in one way or another is pursuing the pot of gold at the end of it. Arriving at the profound and surprising insight that all physical phenomena, from images and energies to chemical and solid bodies, are built on oscillation, Maxwell embarked on a science of shaking. For roughly a hundred and fifty years, this improbable topic has animated all physics. Another word for oscillation is temperature. Without the oscillations, the mostly empty matter of the universe would collapse in on itself. In theory, you can make the shaking stop, but only by making things cold indeed -- 273 degrees below zero Celsius, or zero Kelvin. So far unreachable even in laboratories, it is the temperature of the universe's heat death. When things oscillate, they make waves, and in that magic moment the possibility of the telecosm is born. Maxwell's genius was to realize that all waves are mathematically identical, and can be arrayed along a continuum known as the spectrum. The unity of the spectrum makes possible the ubiquity and interoperability of communications systems and thus enables the unification of the world economy in the new era. The light your eyes can see is only a tiny slice of the range of "colors" that actually exist or can be created. They run from the background rumble of the universe at the low, or "dark" end, to shrieking gamma rays that can penetrate a planet at the high "bright" end. Each wavelength has its own distinct characteristics -- some are better at transmitting raw power, others for traveling long distances, others for carrying digital bits. Slices of Maxwell's rainbow form the core of virtually every significant modern technology: 60-hertz household power cords and three kilohertz (thousand-cycle) telephones; 700 megahertz ( mega is million) Pentium PCs; two gigahertz (billion) cellular phones and 200 terahertz (trillion) fiber-optic cables. The neurons in your brain, for their part, hum along at barely a kilohertz; thank the Lord for parallel processing. Dental X rays, at the other extreme, top a petahe...
