In the Beginning Was Information (25 page)

Figure 33: The information spiral.

Two different information ranges are illustrated in Figure 34, namely biological information as stored in DNA molecules — represented by the ant — and a microchip as used in the latest computers.

Figure 34: The ant and the microchip. Microchips are the storage elements of present-day computers. Their details are practically invisible, since structure widths are about one millionth of a meter. What a 30-ton computer of the University of Pennsylvania (USA) could do in 1946 can now be accomplished by a chip less than 6 square mm in size. Only a few years ago, chips which could store the text of four typed pages were regarded as revolutionary. Today, all the telephone numbers of a city like Canberra, Australia, can be stored on one chip, and their speed of operation is so fast that the Bible could be read 200 times in one second, but there is one thing that all the chips in the world will never be able to do, namely to copy an ant and all it can do. (Source: "Werkbild Philips"; with the kind permission of "Valvo Unternehmens-bereichs Bauelemente" of Philips GmbH, Hamburg.)

1. Computer technology:
Konrad Zuse (1910–1996), a German inventor, pioneered the concept of a program-driven computer when he built the first operational electrical computing machine Z3 in 1941. It utilized 600 telephone relays for calculations, and 2,000 relays for storage. It could store 64 numbers in every group of 22 binary positions, could perform between 15 and 20 arithmetic operations per second, and one multiplication required 4 to 5 seconds. The next advance was the introduction of vacuum tubes (first generation electronic computers), and the ENIAC computer became operational in 1946. It had more than 18,000 vacuum tubes and other components wired together by means of more than half a million soldered connections. One addition operation required 0.2 thousandths of a second and a multiplication could be performed in 2.8 thousandths of a second. This installation utilized a word length
^[24]
of 10 decimal places, it weighed 30 tons, and consumed 150 kW of electrical power. After several years of research, transistors were invented in 1947. They were much smaller and faster than vacuum tubes, and their introduction as switching elements initiated the second computer generation in 1955. The next milestone on the way leading to the powerful computers of today was the idea of integrated circuits (ICs). Different components are incorporated and interconnected in similar-looking units made of the same materials. The first IC was made in 1958, based on the novel integration idea proposed by Kilby and Hoerni. Further development of this concept, and the steady increase in the number of circuit elements per silicon chip, saw the advent of the third computer generation. ICs have undergone a rapid development since the first simple ones introduced in 1958. Today, 64-Megabit chips are commonplace.

Five degrees of integration can be distinguished according to the number of components per structural unit:

SSI  (Small Scale Integration)  1 to 10

MSI  (Medium Scale Integration)  10 to 10
³

LSI  (Large Scale Integration)  10
³
to 10
⁴

VLSI  (Very Large Scale Integration)  10
⁴
to 10
⁶

GSI  (Grand Scale Integration)  10
⁶
and upward

High levels of integration, where between 500 and 150,000 transistors are accommodated on one silicon chip having an area of between 5 and 30 mm
²
, led to the development of microprocessors. This technology made it possible to have complete processing or storage units on a single chip. The number of circuits that can be integrated on one chip doubled approximately every second year. The first experimental chip capable of storing more than one million bits (1 Megabit = 2
²⁰
bits = 1,048,576 bits), was developed in 1984 by IBM. The silicon wafer used measured 10.5 mm x 7.7 mm = 80.85 mm
²
, so that the storage density was 13,025 bits per square mm. The time required to access data on this chip was 150 nanoseconds (1 ns = 10
^-9
s). The degree of integration increased steadily in subsequent years.

The question arises whether the density of integration could be increased indefinitely. In an article in
Elektronische Rechenanlagen (Electronic Computers)
[F4], O.G. Folberth pointed out the obstacles that would have to be overcome in future developments. Such hurdles in manufacturing technology, complexity of design, and testing problems, are, however, not fundamental, but there are hard physical boundaries of a final nature which would be impossible to overcome (geometric, thermic, and electrical limits). The maximum integration density which can be achieved with present-day silicon technology, can be calculated; it is found to be 2.5 x 10
⁵
lattice units per mm
²
.

The improvement of hardware elements made it possible for computer terminals and personal computers to be as powerful as earlier mainframe computers. One of the fastest computers made is the CRAY C916/16, one of the C-90 series. The processing speed of this 16 processor computer is about 10 GFLOPS (= 10 Giga-FLOPS). One FLOPS (floating point operations per second) means that one computation involving real numbers with floating decimal signs, can be executed in one second; 10 GFLOPS is thus equal to 10 thousand million arithmetic calculations like addition and multiplication performed in one second.

2. Degree of integration in living cells:
We have now been represented with an astounding development involving the increasing degree of integration (number of circuit elements in one chip) and the integration density (degree of miniaturization; circuit elements per area unit) as seen in computer technology. There is no precedent for such a rapid and unique development in any other field of technology.

The information stored in the DNA molecules of all living cells is indispensable for the numerous guided processes involving complex and unique functions. The human DNA molecule (body cells) is about 79 inches (2 m) long when stretched, and it contains 6 x 10
⁹
chemical letters. We may well ask what the packing density of this information could be, and it is fairly easy to calculate. According to Table 3, the information content of one nucleotide is two bits, giving a total of 12 x 10
⁹
bits for one DNA molecule. Divide this by the number of bits in one Kbit (1024); this results in a degree of integration of 11.72 million Kbits, which is 180 times as much as the above-mentioned 64 Megabit chip. The density of integration is discussed more fully in the next section.

This comparison makes it patently clear that the evolutionary view requires us to believe things which are totally unreasonable. Thousands of man-years of research as well as unprecedented technological developments were required to produce a Megabit chip, but we are expected to believe that the storage principles embodied in DNA, with their much higher degree of integration, developed spontaneously in matter which was left to itself. Such a "theory" is, to say the least, absurd in the highest degree!

A1.2.3 The Highest Packing Density of Information

The greatest known density of information is that in the DNA of living cells. The diameter of this chemical storage medium, illustrated in Figure 35, is 2 nm = 2 x 10
^-9
m, and the spiral increment of the helix is 3.4 nm (Greek
hélix
= winding, spiral). The volume of this cylinder is
V
=
h
x
d
²
x π /4:

V
= 3.4 x 10
^-7
cm x (2 x 10
^-7
cm)
²
x π/4 = 10.68 x 10
^-21
cm
³
per winding

There are 10 chemical letters (nucleotides) in each winding of the double spiral, giving a statistical information density of:

Ú = 10 letters/(10.68 x 10
^-21
cm
³
) = 0.94 x 10
²¹
letters per cm
³

Figure 35: Comparison of statistical information densities. DNA molecules contain the highest known packing density of information. This exceedingly brilliant storage method reaches the limit of the physically possible, namely down to the level of single molecules. At this level the information density is more than 10 21 bits per cm 3 . This is 7.7 million million times the density obtained when the entire Bible is reproduced on one photographic slide A. Only if 7.7 million million Bibles could be represented on one slide B (this is only theoretically possible!), having 2.77 million rows and 2.77 million columns with the entire Bible reproduced in each miniscule rectangle, would we obtain an information packing density equal to that present in all living cells.