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Jim Crutchfield
Distinguished Professor of Physics
University of California, Davis
Imagine a world where cell phones never need to be charged. Instead of charging a phone daily, the battery on these ubiquitous technological devices lasts three years. At the end of the battery life, the phone is simply replaced (and hopefully recycled). This is not out of the realm of possibility thanks to a new discovery from a Telluride Science workshop.
Jim Crutchfield, Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC Davis, has been attending Telluride workshops since 2014. His first experience in Telluride was so impactful that a year later, he organized a workshop called Information Engines, which led to an important rethinking of how systems use information and energy to support their function. This new thinking was leveraged and applied to the design of energy efficient computer devices and logic gates (a building block of computation and information processing). The result--new logic gates that are 10,000x more energy efficient than current technologies. This will ultimately have a major impact on reducing the massive amounts of energy that large-scale server farms consume. With expected exponential increases in computing, this impact will only grow.
Crutchfield states that new ideas are generated at Telluride Science workshops because of the unique format and the interaction time built into the schedule. “Afternoons are open and free; people convene in different subgroups and go hiking or walking. That is when participants often have some of their best ideas. The informal time is crucial to the creative process.”
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