The more you know, the less you understand.
Once upon a time, a man/woman with a file, a torch, and a stubborn streak could build anything—a bridge, a steam engine, a boat, a car, a computer, an airplane, even a spaceship if you gave him long enough. They didn’t need permission from an algorithm or help from a chatbot. They had skills, and with that skill came a strange, sacred thing we once valued: precision.
These days, we talk a big game about it. Precision medicine, precision agriculture, precision strikes from drones named after birds of prey. But somewhere along the way, while our machines grew smarter, we got… lazier. We’ve traded craft for convenience, and now the only precision left is inside our processors—not our hands.
The question no one wants to ask is: what happens when the power flickers and the cloud disappears?
What happens when the craftsman is gone, and all we have left is code we didn’t write, tools we can’t fix, and knowledge we never learned?
The Modern World: Built on Precision
In our time, we swim in an ocean of precision. It’s so omnipresent that we barely notice it. From your car’s engine to the phone in your hand, from the plane slicing through the sky to the semiconductor dancing inside your dishwasher—everything works because we learned to shave metal down to nanometers.
Measured in billionths of a meter, these tolerances aren’t just tiny—they’re damn near invisible. The width of a helium atom is around 0.06 nanometers. That’s the playground of our modern machines, and it’s what separates the world of reliable function from the chaos of misfires and malfunctions.
Simon Winchester, in his book The Perfectionists, charts the rise of this pursuit of precision—beginning in 18th-century England with chronometers, cannon boring, and steam pistons. Before that, cannon makers just hoped they didn’t explode. Afterwards, they shot straight. And with every leap in accuracy came a new leap in possibility: factories, engines, space travel, nuclear weapons. But Winchester suggests precision began there.
And that’s where some of us raise an eyebrow.
What If Precision Is Older Than We Think?
You see, if we’re being honest—and I hope we are—then precision didn’t start with steam. It was merely rediscovered. There’s compelling evidence that ancient civilizations were not only familiar with precision—they were masters of it.
Take the Serapeum of Saqqara, for instance. Hidden beneath Egypt’s sands lies an underground labyrinth filled with 24 giant megalithic boxes—each weighing up to 100 tons. Carved from single blocks of granite, these behemoths were not just made—they were crafted. And not with rough edges either. Using precision straightedges and measuring tools, engineers like Christopher Dunn have shown that the inner walls of these boxes are flat and square to tolerances of 0.0001 inches—within one-twentieth the width of a human hair.
Let that sink in. These aren’t assembled pieces. They’re monolithic. You mess up once, you start over. And it wasn’t just one box. Dozens. Repeated with astonishing consistency. Not “close enough.” They had to be Perfect.
The Meaning Behind the Precision
Here’s the thing about precision: it always means something. In the modern world, we don’t make things this way unless there’s a functional reason. You don’t build to these tolerances unless:
- You have the tools that can’t do imprecise work.
- Or you must build it this way to achieve a necessary function.
- Machines are needed for this Precision. People can no longer deal with it.
You need that kind of precision to build pressure chambers, resonance devices, or precision-aligned containment vessels—technologies we use in aerospace and nuclear engineering.
Shipbuilders Without Ships
Take something massive—like shipbuilding. In the past, the keel was laid with care, and welders knew the names of the men beside them. Precision was human. Ships were born from grit and design, not templates and simulations.
Now, designs are digitized, outsourced, and fabricated by people who never see open water. The soul of the machine is vanishing, and with it, the art of repair. Can you fix a hull breach if your manuals are in a server farm on another continent?
Precision without resilience is just a trick waiting to break.
The Programmers Who Don’t Know What They Wrote
And in the information world, where programming has become a conversation with AI, we face a different kind of loss: cognitive precision.
Why plan a system when AI can whip up some code in seconds? Who needs documentation when you can “ask it again later”?
The result is a patchwork of digital duct tape—functional, yes. But structured like a house built by termites: active, but always moments from collapse. We’ve moved from design thinking to reaction scripting. The art of thinking deeply before doing is slipping away.
Misinformation: The Opposite of Precision
In the same digital world, information—the thing we once treasured—is now cheap and untrustworthy. Everyone has facts, and no one agrees. Truth used to be built like a bridge: slowly, with rivets and verification.
Now it’s tossed out in 280-character fragments, generated without sourcing, and shared without thinking.
We measure physical surfaces to the millionth of an inch but accept digital nonsense measured only by virality.
How can a civilization stay precise when its understanding of the world is shaped by an algorithm that optimizes for engagement—not truth?
Maybe one day, long after the last server dies and the lights go out, someone will dig up an old laptop and wonder what we knew—what we really knew.
Maybe they’ll find a piece of hand-cut steel and marvel not at its weight, but at the care someone once put into shaping it. Maybe they’ll understand that true precision isn’t just in what we build—it’s in how we build it, why we build it, and whether we could do it again without asking a machine first.
Because in the end, if we lose our tools, we can build them again. But if we lose our precision—our respect for knowledge, craft, and careful thought—then we’re not just losing skills.
We’re losing ourselves.
EXTRA CREDIT: Atomic Scale Machines -Making 7nm and future 2nm chips
The creation of 7nm and future 2nm chips is one of the most extraordinary feats of precision engineering humanity has ever achieved. It’s a process that combines atomic-scale control, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, and mind-bendingly complex manufacturing steps—all done by machines that cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.
The Basics of Chip Scaling
- A “7nm” or “2nm” chip refers to the smallest feature size on the chip—specifically, the transistor gate length (or an equivalent metric).
- For perspective:
- A human hair is ~70,000 nm thick.
- 7nm features are 10,000 times smaller than the width of a hair.
- 2nm features are approaching the size of just 10 silicon atoms!
At this scale, building chips is no longer about carving patterns into silicon. It’s about atomic-level precision and materials science.
The Machines That Make Them
The crown jewel of advanced semiconductor manufacturing is ASML’s EUV lithography machine.
ASML EUV Lithography
- Cost: ~$350 million per machine.
- Size: About the size of a city bus, weighing 180 tons.
- Precision: It positions wafers with nanometer-level accuracy—equivalent to hitting a golf ball in Los Angeles with a laser pointer from New York.
- Light Source: Instead of traditional deep ultraviolet (DUV) light at 193nm wavelength, EUV uses 13.5nm wavelength light.
- Generating this light is an engineering miracle: a droplet of tin is shot with a high-energy laser (50,000 times a second), creating plasma that emits EUV light.
- Mirrors coated with multilayer molybdenum-silicon stacks (designed at the atomic level) direct this faint EUV light onto the silicon wafer.
Why EUV is Critical for 7nm and Beyond
- With older 193nm DUV systems, chipmakers had to use multi-patterning—writing the same feature multiple times to “shrink” it artificially.
- EUV can pattern extremely small features in a single step—dramatically increasing precision and reducing errors.
How a Chip Is Made (Simplified)
- Silicon Wafer Preparation: A pure silicon crystal is sliced into wafers, polished, and coated with light-sensitive material (photoresist).
- Patterning with Lithography: The EUV light patterns the circuit design onto the wafer.
- Etching and Deposition: Plasma etching removes unwanted material; atomic layer deposition (ALD) adds ultra-thin layers of materials, sometimes just one atom thick.
- Doping: Precise placement of dopants (atoms like boron or phosphorus) to alter silicon conductivity.
- Metal Interconnects: Ultra-thin copper or cobalt wiring is laid down to connect transistors, often using chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) to flatten surfaces.
- Repeating Steps: The process is repeated hundreds of times to build up layers (modern chips have over 80 layers).
- Packaging: The finished die is cut, tested, and packaged for integration into devices.
The Leap to 2nm Chips
2nm chips will push manufacturing to the edge of physical limits, requiring new transistor designs:
- Gate-All-Around (GAA) Transistors: Replacing FinFET, GAA wraps the gate around the channel for better control and lower power consumption.
- EUV High-NA (High Numerical Aperture): ASML is building the next-gen EUV machines with 0.55 NA optics, allowing even finer resolution than today’s EUV.
- New Materials: Silicon may get help from graphene, germanium, or 2D materials like MoS₂ to reduce resistance and leakage.
Why These Machines Are So Special
- Precision: ASML’s wafer stages move with atomic-level stability—they float on a magnetic field to eliminate vibrations.
- Optics: Mirrors are polished to better than 20 picometers (1/50,000th of a human hair).
- Collaboration: Only a few companies—ASML, Zeiss, and TSMC/Samsung/Intel—can coordinate this technology.
- Each EUV machine has over 100,000 parts and takes a year to build.
The Future Beyond 2nm
- Sub-2nm: We’re approaching quantum tunneling limits, where electrons “leak” through transistor gates.
- Chiplets: Instead of making a single monolithic chip, future designs may rely on multiple smaller chips (chiplets) connected with ultra-precise interposers.
- 3D Stacking: Vertical chip layers (like 3D NAND) will allow more transistors in smaller footprints.
- Quantum Precision: We may need quantum-based lithography or entirely new computing architectures.
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