The World's Most Important Machine

This is a microchip. When you zoom in, you find a nanoscopic computing city. Skyscrapers hundreds of layers tall with hundreds of kilometers of wires connecting everything. And at the very bottom is this transistors, billions of them.

They are the ones and zeros of our computer. The chip works by whizzing electrons from transistor to transistor. And the smaller you can make those transistors, the less the signals have to travel. So the faster they can compute.

Plus, you can fit more [music] transistors into the same area, resulting in a much more powerful chip. So, for over 50 years, transistors got smaller and smaller, and the number you could fit on a chip doubled every 2 years. This became known as Moore's law, named for Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore after he noticed the pattern back in 1965, and it's been one of the main drivers of the tech industry. But around 2015, progress [music] came to a screeching halt.

And we might have never gotten past it if it wasn't for a single company that makes these machines. The machines that saved Moors law. Holy. This is a video about the most complicated commercial product humanity's ever built.

That's insane. It costs a whopping $400 million. And it is so bizarre that I want to introduce it to you with a thought experiment. Imagine you are shrunk down to the size of an end and you're given a laser that's strong enough to melt through metal like butter.

Next, a tiny droplet of molten tin, roughly the size of a white blood cell, is shot out in front of you around 250 km hour. And your task is to hit this not once, not twice, but three times in a row in 20 micro seconds with your little laser. Well, that is exactly what this machine [music] does. It hits one tiny tin droplet three times in a row, heating each one up to over 220,000 Kelvin.

That's roughly 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun. And it doesn't just hit one droplet, it hits 50,000 droplets every single second. >> How often do you miss a laser shot? >> We don't miss them.

>> What? You do 150,000 laser shots a second and you don't miss one. >> Exactly. The same machine also contains mirrors that might just be the smoothest objects in the universe....