The Silicon Web: Physics for the Internet Age , Michael G. Raymer , Taylor & Francis, New York, 2009. $89.95 (571 pp.). ISBN 978-1-4398-0311-0
The internet—and the technologies that underlie it—has revolutionized the world. But a cursory survey of most of today’s undergraduate science curricula would reveal that the revolution has had little impact on what science majors learn and that those curricula have been in a cryogenically frozen state. When I was a student, more than 50 years ago, the transistor had just been invented, but most undergraduate science majors still do not learn how transistors or other related technologies work. I even wonder whether many academic theorists can, for example, explain the difference between digital and analog noise.
It might be easy enough to imagine a textbook that addresses the science behind the internet, but actually writing it would be much more difficult. It would have to talk about how physical concepts are applied to computers and the internet and how electronic computation has transformed mathematics from an abstract logical exercise into an essential everyday tool. It would have to explain how billions of semiconductor components are assembled on computer chips and how they transmit information across an optical-fiber network. The text would also have to include the branches of physics that contribute to such technologies—classical and quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnet-ism, to name a few. One might think that mastering all of the book’s material would require years of graduate-level study taught by a team of professors from solid-state chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, physics, and even pure mathematics.
Into this apparently hopeless situation, University of Oregon physics professor Michael Raymer has brought The Silicon Web: Physics for the Internet Age, a text perfect in itself and perfect for its time. Raymer developed the book to supplement his Physics Behind the Internet course for nonscience majors, which, according to his website, covers “the basics of information, communication, atomic physics, semiconductor device physics, and optical physics and technology.” The Silicon Web covers all those topics and many more, with an average of more than one illustration per page. It provides a rich historical background of the key developments, some of which I witnessed at Bell Labs; Raymer was not there, but he has a rich imagination, and he has reinvented the excitement by himself. He introduces the key industry and scientific terms, uses them, explains them, and uses them again, always in an appealing context. Every few pages feature quick reality-check questions that connect the technical material to real-world applications. If there is a pedagogical trick that Raymer has not used, it is one unknown to me.
Having built a perfect mousetrap—this beautiful book with its lavish assortment of topics—I imagine the author supposed that the world would beat a path to his door. That hasn’t happened, perhaps because the book is mistakenly marketed primarily to nonscience majors. As written, The Silicon Web is ideal for an undergraduate course required of all physical science, engineering, computer science, and mathematics majors. I acknowledge that its physics may be “too easy” (is that really possible?) for physics students, but such a cross-disciplinary course would give them exposure to other specialties that they would otherwise not receive. That kind of multidisciplinary interaction could lead to cross-disciplinary friendships and the formation of a startup business—or simply enrich a student’s learning environment.
Of course, physicists worldwide are doing impressive work in all of the field’s traditional subdisciplines and many nontraditional ones. But why has everyone become so specialized that few—apart from Raymer and a hardy but lonely band of others—seem to care, or even to be aware of how the greatest scientific revolution in history took place in their time?
