From Analog to Digital and Back
Bits are the new electrons. The nature of analog computing is to take control.
In July 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 70-year-old lawyer, philosopher, and mathematician whose “tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” joined Peter the Great, the 44-year-old tsar of Russia, in taking the cure at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, drinking mineral water instead of alcohol for the duration of their eight-day stay.
Leibniz, who would be dead within the year, laid three grand projects before the tsar. First was a proposal to send an overland expedition across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pacific, where one or more oceangoing vessels would be launched on a voyage of discovery to determine whether Asia and America were separated, and if so, where? What languages were spoken by the inhabitants, and could this shed light on the origins and evolution of the human race? Were the rivers navigable? How does the magnetic declination vary with location, and does it also vary in time? What lay between the Russian Far East and the American Northwest? Could Russia extend its claims?
Second was a proposal to establish a Russian academy of sciences, modeled on the success of the existing European academies while leaving their infirmities behind.
