I Am John Galt by Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta Page A

transistors and how they link together to form the ultrafast memory chips his company is famous for. Terms like P-N junction, tetrahedral bonding, and inversion layer conduction as a quantum-mechanical phenomenon rolled off his tongue like an ordinary Joe’s barber shop banter on baseball statistics.
    Rodgers’s latest generation of technology, known as a programmable system on a chip (PSoC), is a world’s first. The design consists of configurable analog and digital peripheral functions, memory, and a microcontroller—essentially an entire computer—on a single chip. Engineers no longer have to hunt down, configure, physically connect, and test individual components to drive electronic products. Using PSoC, they simply drag and drop various modules on a computer-based graphical user interface, hit “go,” and the chip configures and programs itself to the designer’s specifications. Currently Rodgers’s PSoC technology is being used in products as diverse as computer printers, high-definition televisions (HDTVs), touch-screen cell phones, ad even washing machines and coffee makers.
    â€œThe big chip we’re just now starting to ramp up, it’s the size of my little fingernail, and I had 300 engineers working on it for three years,” he reveals proudly about his latest project. “When we slice the chip in half to look at a cross section, to look at the transistor profiles and see if the thing’s being done right, we literally can see atoms,” he said in amazement, laying out a couple of images labeled “High Resolution TEM SiO2.” And sure enough, the individual atoms were clearly visible stacked neatly in an organized matrix, “like a rack of pool balls.”
    All that said, on another level brilliant physics and brilliant philosophy are two sides of the same enterprise. Physics taught T.J. what Aristotle taught Ayn Rand: that A is A, that existence exists, and any philosophy that says it doesn’t is a pack of lies. As T.J. puts it, “Silicon always tells the truth.”
    How did T. J. Rodgers come to such confidently held beliefs, such strong bedrock principles? Was there a primary influence? An Objectivist mentor in college? A libertarian guru leading him through his formative years?
    â€œThe fact is there was no one person,” he responds thoughtfully. “I really believe it’s genetic; I really do. Part of it is the fact that I’m scientist and an engineer and, in that business, Maxwell’s equations don’t give a shit if you’re Republican or Democrat.”
    He explains, “There are laws of physics and chemistry that allow you to understand and make respectively that chip and then electrical engineering, which allow you to assemble millions of things together and have them work right. And they are what they are. To say, you know, ‘It’s his fault,’ or ‘I didn’t get enough resources,’ or ‘If we only had a subsidy.’ All that stuff is just crap; it’s an excuse. Silicon always tells the truth.”
    â€œMan can rearrange the materials that exist in reality, but he cannot violate their identity; he cannot escape the laws of nature,” 15 wrote Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s designated intellectual heir. The political corollary, as Rand herself wrote, is that “To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.” 16
    In the Cypress boardroom hangs a reproduction of Raphael’s masterpiece, The School of Athens . Rodgers uses it as a metaphor for the concrete reality he so loves and admires. In the picture, Plato and Aristotle walk together in the center of the canvas under a marble archway surrounded by ancient scholars, including Pythagoras, Euclid, Socrates, and Ptolemy. An aged and wise-looking Plato points to the sky with one finger, symbolizing his Theory of Forms, which concludes that abstract ideas, not the material