The Discrete Charm of the Machine

by Ken Steiglitz

If you were to walk up to me and ask, “Hey, how do I efficiency drill holes into this circuitboard?” I would pretend I didn’t hear you, avert my gaze, and continue on about my day. If you were to ask me to read a book about the same concern, I would sigh and do a dismissive little handwave toward my “to-be-read” pile. But tell me you’re interested in discussing how to most efficiently help a little peddler navigate from small village to village, and boy oh boy does my heart begin to race.

I am an ROI maxi wrt peddler-boot wear & tear.

Part of my “workflow” for reviewing books is selecting what I think is going to be slower, more dense reads when I’m behind on writing. This intentional hobbling sometimes backfires, as was the case here: what I expected to be laborious ended up being an absolute pleasure. An embarrassment of riches, The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital took vacuum tubes and transistors and made them both approachable. It did exactly what it promised, vaulting over the expertise gap to reach me, a tech dabbler, and teach me exactly why our world is digital. It did a lot more, too, but give it up for a non-fiction book that more than lives up to the inherent promise of its subtitle, as rare a bird as I’ve found.

Discrete Charm basically advertised itself to my layman eyes as being a book about circuit boards, I guess, so I shouldn’t have been surprised: “How the world became digital” is an invitation to tell me about technology that begins and ends in my mind with a digital watch vs. an analogue one. To be honest, I definitely didn’t I know enough about digital technologies to expect anything at all. Somehow, the book met me at my level; it didn’t demand that I come in after a post-grad refresher course on electrical engineering. It wasn’t ashamed of me for living through the era of the digital revolution and not really knowing why I stopped using rabbit ears for my TV-tuner. As an aside, my most vivid memory of “digital replacement” tech was when NYC was advertising that old TV antennas weren’t going to work and you could pick up a free digital antenna, um, I think from your cable company? The vague “100110”-type understanding of “digital” signals that rattled around in my head was not a useful way for me to think about how the world works—when you can’t even define digital or analogue, the world is run by vague magic. And as for my a priori understanding of digital watches, let me say that the display of a watch is not what makes it digital or analogue, something I didn’t even consider that I didn’t know.

Discrete Charm really is flâneur-friendly. I try not to be too hard on myself for walking around not knowing stuff—Discrete Charm certainly isn’t. It wants you to succeed. And I have a very concrete example of how the book not only made me enjoy reading it, but made me feel better about myself:

When electrons, or any other particles, penetrate what seem like solid barriers, we say they tunnel. It’s one more thing that can happen in the quantum-mechanical world of the very small that does not happen in our everyday experience. It means that the width of the channel in a field-effect transistor, or the gate in other kinds of transistors, can get so small–but no smaller. There comes a point in shrinking the size of transistors when electrons will tunnel from source to drain, and the valve no longer works as it should.

“Hey,” I think to myself. “There’s going to be a problem, eventually, if electrons can tunnel and we keep making our transistors smaller and smaller. Eventually, there’s going to be a hard limit.” Yes, that excerpt literally says that. But I understood it! And I applied it later in another chapter. I was following the breadcrumb trail the author had laid in recognizing that our exponential growth of processing power fundamentally cannot continue to infinity—at least not following in the exact same way the growth has gone for the last sixty or so years.

It should be clear by now that I’ve been setting you up on a collision course with the laws of nature. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle sets a fundamental limit on how fine a line we can draw on a silicon wafer, and quantum tunneling limits how narrow we can make the all-important channel (or equivalent gating structure) in a transistor.

And when the author said “It should be clear by now that I’ve been setting you up on a collision course with the laws of nature…” it actually was clear! Discrete Charm led me to water, and it didn’t splash it in my face and move on to whatever clever point it wanted to make. I learned something! It felt like I learned something. I drew a conclusion, the book expressed support for me in drawing that conclusion, and then it talked about why that conclusion is probably accurate. I read a lot of non-fiction, and a lot of the time the material is either tediously expressed to make sure you understand every single detail, glossed over so it’s tough to follow, or expressed as some sort of revelation on the part of the author, not the reader. I cannot repeat enough how friendly Discrete Charm is on every page, no matter the complexity.

I am the type of nerd that needs my math to be in word problems. I love word problems! It’s why I did very well on the LSAT, even if I am antithetically designed for the format of a legal education and the profession and practice of law in general. An embarrassing story that I don’t believe I’ve ever told a single person is that in early grammar school I used to assign characters (like Conan the Barbarian, or Link from The Legend of Zelda) to different numbers and pretend that math equations were battles, and that, say, if the solution was 18 then whoever was 1 and whoever was 8 “won” the little tournament in my mind. It complicated my math-life in not a good way—unlike this book:

Here is a very pretty little problem, called Steiner’s problem. Suppose we are given N towns on a flat Earth, and we wish to connect them with a network of roads. How do we do so with the least possible total length of roadway?

…the real difficulty in this problem, which becomes apparent when the number of towns grows much beyond three or four, is the embarrassingly large number of possibilities that arise for the choice of junction points–which, by the way, are called Steiner points. We do have some help from the mathematicians, who have proved that we never need more than N - 2 Steiner points, and that at any Steiner points exactly three roads meet, always at angles of 120°.

Here’s the peddler problem! Presented as abstract math, I hate it. Given as “potential savings in concrete usage to construct roads,” I don’t particularly care. Given as “the movement and time for a robotic drill to travel around a circuit board to punch discrete holes,” I’m starting to be mildly intrigued. Given that it can be any or all of these together and at once, I’m on (circuit)board. The practical applications of this abstract equation have expand out before me. Is this the moment when I realize math is actually super cool?

This is not the first time I’ve read a genpop book about mathy bits that makes me wish I had stuck with my imaginary math-based character battle system. Or if I had decided to consider math in a way that was interesting to me, specifically, rather than just backing away from it. There are nearly infinite ways to reframe math equations as something near and dear to your heart; could I have made diff EQ “rate of change” questions be about the momentum of a longsword vs a broadsword or something intensely interesting to me at 15 (though secretly, because this was the 1990s in rural upstate New York and I liked fantasy books, not football)? Picking up terms of art like infrared catastrophe and ultraviolet catastrophe—terms that are so much cooler than return on investment or easement or motion in the backfield—make every page pretty surprising and cool. Roll out that “sufficiently advanced technology is magic” quote, apply it to early scholastic math, and let the ren faire nerds pretend they’re solving mystical rituals. Boom, STEM for all.

While the functional storage of text on the internet is essentially infinite, my free time is unfortunately approaching zero. Before I wrap up, it is important to note that beyond fun and joyful, Discrete Charm is also straight-up informative for large-scale cultural issues:

The real advantages of glass fiber [over copper wire] stem from the differences in the physical properties of photons and electrons. Hecht puts it very well: electrons interact strongly with other matter and are therefore well suited for logic and memory; photons do not interact strongly and are perfect for long-distance communication–where interaction is highly undesirable. When the time was ripe, we saw the exponential explosion of electron-based chip technology and several decades later the explosion of photon-based fiber transmission. Today we enjoy the benefits of both periods.

The concept that more than one underlying technology hit a rare-growth curve to support the current interconnected reality is really interesting; shrinking transistors but also the photon-based digital information transfer over fiber optics. Our wildly advancing world is starting to plateauing; things other than processing power and packet speed will have to be emphasized if extractive corporate entities want to keep wowing the public with big swings. From a cultural standpoint, it’s important to note why things might feel like they’re stagnating—it might be because they are. There will be a point where we simply cannot build a smaller/faster/better transistor.

I don’t know what witchcraft is in Discrete Charm that makes it so completely comprehensible; I know that if complex math continues to be explained to me like this, I’ll start seriously listening when I hear people debating the most efficient ways to drill holes in circuit boards.