Green Oasis

Engineers at HP have created a memristor, the fourth passive electrical circuit element after resistors, capacitors, and inductors. This may mean next to nothing to most of my readers (not criticizing) but for me this was a “Holy shit!” moment.

The memristor was theorized almost forty years ago by Leon Chua. This represents a fundamental shift in the understanding of circuit theory; it means that the textbooks that I learned electrical circuits are obsolete:

“Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years—voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge,” said Chua. “The situation is analogous to what is called ‘Aristotle’s Law of Motion’, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration—the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic textbooks have been teaching using the wrong variables—voltage and charge—explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies. What they should have been teaching is the relationship between changes in voltage, or flux, and charge.

In practical application, the memristor may enable us to continue to make smaller and smaller circuitry with less power required and less heat dissipated.

Wow!