What if you could someday put the manufacturing power of an automobile plant on your desktop? According to Neil Gershenfeld, the renowned MIT scientist and inventor, the next big thing is personal fabrication-the ability to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics and industrial tools. Personal fabricators are about to revolutionize the world just as personal computers did a generation ago, and Fab shows us how.

The Physics of Information Technology explores the familiar devices that we use to collect, transform, transmit, and interact with electronic information. Many such devices operate surprisingly close to very many fundamental physical limits. Understanding how such devices work, and how they can (and cannot) be improved, requires deep insight into the character of physical law as well as engineering practice. The book starts with an introduction to units, forces, and the probabilistic foundations of noise and signaling, then progresses through the electromagnetics of wired and wireless...

This book first covers exact and approximate analytical techniques (ordinary differential and difference equations, partial differential equations, variational principles, stochastic processes); numerical methods (finite differences for ODE's and PDE's, finite elements, cellular automata); model inference based on observations (function fitting, data transforms, network architectures, search techniques, density estimation); as well as the special role of time in modeling (filtering and state estimation, hidden Markov processes, linear and nonlinear time series). Each of the topics in the book...

What if anyone could make (almost) anything? That's the promise, and peril, of the third digital revolution.

Two digital revolutions-in computing and communication- have radically transformed our economy and lives. A third digital revolution is upon us, in fabrication. Beyond the hype around 3D printers, digital fabrication technologies are exponentially accelerating in capability-community fab labs will be followed by digital personal fabrication and, ultimately, universal replicators straight out of Star Trek. While advances in digital fabrication promise...