Gravity isn't simply a good idea. It's the law. Hey, it's Seth, and this is a Kimbo. We'll be back in a second after this word from our sponsor.

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, 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 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 10 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 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, the same amount of money would buy you twice as much in terms of

computing power. One of his colleagues at Intel where he ended up working David

House turned it into Moore's law.

And what he said was that 18 months, every 18 months computers double in power and speed and efficiency. That simple law, which is generally true and

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