# Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made — Gideon Lewis-Kraus

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/computer-chips-are-the-most-magnificent-things-humanity-has-ever-made
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- **Original Source**: [The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/26/computer-chips-are-the-most-magnificent-things-weve-ever-made) (19 October 2026) · 42 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

## Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

The other thing that stood out to me in Lewis-Kraus's piece is his description of globalization. As he rightly says, globalization has become a dirty word, but the simple fact is that most of the material comforts we enjoy today wouldn't have been possible without it. That's not to say it was all sunshine and roses, with no winners and losers. But the way globalization has become pejorative, and the way we're retreating from it, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It isn't just semiconductors that rely on a global web of cooperation. Look closely at any important thing and you'll see a web of people, ideas, technology, money, governments, universities and researchers, each playing a specific role in making it happen.

It's a weird pathology of the moment, this fetishisation of self-sufficiency and the move towards narrow self-interest. Yes, the cold, hard realpolitik is that self-sufficiency is insurance against lopsided dependencies in a conflict, and the classic example is Taiwan and its so-called silicon shield. If China and the US went to war, or China blockaded Taiwan, TSMC's fabs there would be in the firing line, and Pat Gelsinger has said that even a three-week brownout would be worse than the Great Depression. Whether or not he's exactly right is beside the point. The consequences would be spectacularly bad, given how deep electronics have burrowed into every part of our lives. We've already seen a preview, which Lewis-Kraus also mentions: car assembly lines came to a standstill after the pandemic because of the chip shortage. Globalization, and even cooperation, has become a dirty word, and I have absolutely no doubt that as we put up barriers to the flow of people, ideas, money and knowledge, humanity will be left poorer for it.

It's not for nothing that "standing on the shoulders of giants" is a cliché, and all clichés have an iota of truth. Nothing happens in isolation. We're always and everywhere relying on existing knowledge to create new knowledge, and even the paradigm shifts rarely come ex nihilo. Newton wrote the line to Robert Hooke in 1676, and borrowed it from Bernard of Chartres, five centuries earlier. Einstein's general relativity needed Riemann's geometry, which his friend Marcel Grossmann taught him. Look at any scientific advance or major breakthrough, and more often than not it was only possible because of knowledge other people produced, in this giant network of making, sharing and consuming knowledge that is, in a way, pretty much my entire world.

The sheer complexity of making a cutting-edge chip shows in one machine: ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, made in the Netherlands, which turns droplets of tin into a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun and corrals its light onto a silicon wafer. Just think about the absurdity of that. We are the same creatures who built this machine, a true tribute to human ingenuity, and the same creatures who vote for orange-haired loudmouths sowing disorder and discord across the world, who heard a president muse about injecting disinfectant, and who then drank bleach to cure COVID. The dichotomy between the extremes of humanity never ceases to amaze me.

## Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> Tiny droplets of the molten tin are fired out of a cannon into a vacuum chamber, where they are shot—sixty thousand times a second—by unerring lasers. When the tin fog is ignited, the explosion produces a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun. The process, in other words, commences with the industrial production of miniature supernovas. These supernovas emit EUV that must be collected by Zeiss’s mirrors, which cannot function if their surface is marred by even a nanometre of tin debris. The only way to keep the mirrors pristine is to pump a continuous hurricane of hydrogen gas into the supernova’s blast radius. The gathered light ricochets through a hall of mirrors before it is bounced onto the blueprint of the chip. Making this happen a single time took decades of research. The profitability of ASML’s customers relies on it happening near-flawlessly twenty-four hours a day. Recurrent shutdowns, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, would derail the global economy.

## Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- The silicon shield is the idea that Taiwan's chip industry matters so much to the world economy that it deters China from invading, or would bring foreign powers, chiefly the United States, to Taiwan's defence. *(Cite: Wikipedia: Silicon shield)*