The Thinking Sand

About This Book

Reach into your pocket. The phone you are holding contains a fingernail of silicon etched with more electrical switches than there are human beings who have ever lived — and it is made, at its root, from sand. The Thinking Sand is the epic, human, and astonishingly clear story of how humanity took the commonest material on Earth and taught it to count, to remember, and finally to reason.

From the vacuum-tube giants of the 1940s to the transistor born at Bell Labs, from the traitorous eight who built Silicon Valley to Jack Kilby's lonely summer inventing the microchip, from Moore's Law to the impossible Dutch machine that prints circuits with light finer than any eye can see, from Taiwan's silicon shield to the chip war between superpowers and the AI accelerators reshaping the world — E.B Cohen weaves the saga, the science, and the geopolitics into a single gripping narrative for the curious reader.

It is the one book for anyone who has ever held a phone and wondered what is really inside it, and who wants to understand the most important, most invisible, and most fought-over technology of our age — how it works, how it was made, and why the future may depend on it.