Incoming links: Reverse engineering
It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.
Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.
And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.
Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.
Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.
The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.
Physics is brutal.
To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.
For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.
But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.
What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.
The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.
The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.
But that's also why its so fun to dare.
Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:
- brain-computer interface
- fusion power. The question there is, when is "deep", "too deep"?
Marc Verdiell is a French electrical engineer born in 1963 or 1964[ref] and best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel where he does mind blowing repairs and reverse engineering of vintage computers and other electronic equipment.
Marc sold his company LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in April 2001. This was just after the dot-com crash, but Intel apparently still correctly believed that the networking and the Internet would continue to grow and was investing in the area. His associate Frank Shum sued claiming he should be credited for some of the inventions sold but lost and Marc got it all.[ref][ref][ref]. Marc was then almost immediately appointed an Intel fellow at the extremelly early age of 37, and then stayed for a few years at Intel until 2006 according to his LinkedIn.[ref][ref]
Marc's full name is actualy Jean-Marc Verdiell, but Ciro Santilli remembers there was one YouTube video where he mentions he gave up on "Jean" partly because anglophones would murder its pronounciation all the time.
Marc's PhD thesis is listed at: theses.fr/1990PA112048 and it is entitled:which is translated into English as:but the full text is not available online.
Phase locking of semiconductor laser arrays
Profile of Marc Verdiell by Gizmodo (2018)
Source. And a person who makes open educational content like Marc, truly deserves it.
Atherton managed to keep the entire place green and every house has a pool. Wikipedia comments web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/:
Atherton is known for its wealth; in 1990 and 2019, Atherton was ranked as having the highest per capita income among U.S. towns with a population between 2,500 and 9,999, and it is regularly ranked as the most expensive ZIP Code in the United States [(94027)]. The town has very restricting zoning, only permitting one single-family home per acre and no sidewalks. The inhabitants have strongly opposed proposals to permit more housing construction and Forbes confirms it for 2022: web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/, by far on top.
The outcome of closed knowledge is reverse engineering.
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.