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2007 Physics Nobel Prize For Giant Magnetoresistance
A number of readers made sure we are aware that the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for simultaneously and independently discovering giant magnetoresistance. This property has allowed the explosion of disk-space growth and is cited as being one of the first nanotechnology breakthroughs. From the announcement: "Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current."
thanks for making TB class storage available to the average consumer. High storage capacity has helped the digital music/video revolution come along. Thousands and thousands of songs stored on an average PC wouldn't be possible without advances like this.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
As you say, you really don't understand.
The Nobel committee gives prizes not based on whether it benefits the average prole, but whether it advanced the knowledge of physics, chemistry and so on.
BTW: it does benefit you, unless you don't use a sizeable hard drive. The huge hard drives that are available lately are because of this discovery.
thanks for making TB class storage available to the average consumer.
Yes... Pity it's still a shock sensitive, slow, electromechanical device rather than a high speed, rugged, solid state removable cartridge. Seriously, though, isn't it time we started moving away from mechanical storage?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Just compare the achievements of those two geniuses with the recent discussion about the crackpots speculating about the metrics of the universe. Here we have a real, old-fashioned Nobel Prize : a simple and brilliant idea, an experimental demonstration, and practical applications, like in the 1900s were you had to demonstrate the effect in front of the Academy of Sciences in order to get the prize or even to get your paper published, look at the online lessons from the time (Lippman for instance). As a professor of physics I was on the commitee of a conference aimed at high school teachers about modern days physics. I suggested the teachers in charge invited Fert but they answered that they do not understand a single thing about spin and ironically enough they wanted conferences about string theory and particle physics instead : there is definitely something wrong with public outreach of science, astrophysicists and particle physicists having built PR machines on the scale of their accelerators, observatories and budgets, and grabbing a huge part of the grants, when, with the same budget than the CERN spent on condensed matter physics or (relatively) small budget experiments maybe we would have a thousand of discoveries like the one of Fert. I bet that in CERN maybe a physicist in a thousand, with an IQ over 200, sees the big picture and understands what the wotk is really about. Atomic, molecular or condensed state physics, fluid mechanics, soft matter physics, are much more tractable and practical with real challenges (high-TC supraconductivity...) Admiteddly the Web came out of CERN but still...
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Yes, right now there's a problem on the supply side. It turns out that Apple is one of the largest customers of flash memory (with all the iPods...), enough so that if anyone supplying Apple sneezes, prices go up. Flash memory prices are already on their way up in anticipation of Apple's increased demand for the holiday season, in fact (which is around now for production). (This is for the large single chip NAND flash - 1GB+)
If you think about it, Apple is really hard on suppliers - think of them as the Wal-Mart of the computer industry. If they can get a part cheaper, they'll bully their suppliers to get it. Thus, it's really in the supplier's interest to find better ways of making the chips cheaper. 8GB chips are already here, and 16GB ones are going to be commercially available shortly, but still, it's a tight market.
Memory technology has moved to the latest and greatest processes already (no, not 65nm... that's old tech. 35nm for memory is the standard nowadays). Problem is, spinning platters improvements have come about far faster than Moore's law. Heck, there was a time when tape was considerably cheaper (cost per megabyte/GB) than a hard disk, but those days have more or less gone (reserved for those who can afford the ultra expensive systems with TB's of space, where it may be cheaper still, but the initial startup costs are prohibitive for normal people).
Just as it seems we're about to move away from purely Mechanical Memory we find ways to make it better.
The development of spintronics allows many things, not just the hard drive read heads we've all had for the last 10 years. There are a couple of problems with flash, and if researchers can get the sizes down, these can be fixed with MRAM, magnetic memory based on spintronics again.
Also, these are the applications we know about; as with any branch of physics, you have to give the physicists more than 20 years to figure out the physics, and then give the engineers some more time to explore what they can do with it. It takes this at least this long to truly understand the impact, but this is not really what the Nobel Prize is for (it was even originally meant to be awarded in the same year as the research is done, but it's very difficult to fully comprehend just how much of an effect a discovery will have in less than a year (though the 1987 prize for high-Tc superconductivity is an exception).
By giving the Nobel Prize now, they're saying "This has sparked a huge amount of research into a field you discovered and you deserve that credit." It is practically impossible to work in the field and not recognize these guys.
Eat your heart out, Europe! We rock!!!!