Construction Physics

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Why Levittown Didn't Revolutionize Homebuilding
For decades, people have tried to bring mass production methods to housing: to build houses the way we build cars.
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Brian Potter
26
What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.
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Brian Potter
29
Bell Labs Reading List
Unlike the inner workings of a lot of 20th-century companies, there is a fair amount written about Bell Labs, some of it excellent. As usual, the…
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Brian Potter
Building the Bell System
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top. It’s large, but not…
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Brian Potter
26

June 2024

Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
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Brian Potter
87
Fusion Power Reading List
The challenge with reading about a topic like fusion is balancing the tradeoff between technical detail and readability. A book or article should give…
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Brian Potter
How to Build an AI Data Center
This piece is the first in a new series from the Institute for Progress (IFP), called Compute in America: Building the Next Generation of AI…
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Brian Potter
27

May 2024

The Shape of Nuclear Policy
Book review: Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France
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Brian Potter
32
How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output. Even before the U.S. entered the war, the…
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Brian Potter
55
Will Stone Replace Steel and Concrete?
A recent viral tweet by Micah Springut, founder of stone-carving startup Monumental Labs, argued that it will be cheaper to build buildings with stone…
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Brian Potter
25
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab
For the last several decades, one avenue of technological progress has towered over nearly everything else: semiconductors.
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Brian Potter
39
Semiconductor fab reading list
Like with most types of construction, there's no one source that explains how a semiconductor fab is built and operates. But there's an enormous amount…
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Brian Potter
1
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