Gravity isn't simply a good idea. It's the law.

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of a Kimbo.

Before we talk about the most important law of our lifetime, it's worth taking a second to distinguish between

a law and a theory. In popular culture, a law is bigger, better, more powerful than a theory, but in fact the opposite is true.

All a law is is a statement of how things happen, of how the world is. A theory is our explanation as to why it's happening. And

theories get better over time because people come up with better more accurate

explanations of what we're seeing. Theories can be tested. Laws are simple

statements of how the world is.

Douglas Engelbart was one of the most important pioneers of the computer world as we know it today.

In 1968, he gave computer world as we know it today.

In 1968, he gave a demo, and for people who were paying attention,

it was the very first time they saw the mouse

and networks and hypertext all at once, one guy inventing our future.

But about ten years before that, Douglas wrote a paper.

And in that paper, he speculated

about the fact that computers were

going to get smaller, faster, and cheaper.

This is in 1959 1959 a lifetime ago. Well, about five or six years later,

Gordon Moore, who worked in the semiconductor industry, was asked to write a paper, a short paper, predicting the future

of computers. And in it he posited a theory. And his theory was that based on innovation and progress that was getting

made in certain kinds of production computers would get faster and cheaper.

In fact, every two years,

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