The Square Kilometer Array Interferometer

Abstract

The rapid pace of technological development within our civilization has fueled an explosion in our capability to study nature, which in turn has spurred the pace of further technology development and so on ... This feedback cycle leads naturally to an exponential growth of our ability to study nature as measured by almost every imaginable criterion. Whether we chart the evolution of particle accelerator beam energies, the resolution of microscopes, or the performance of computers we see an exponential increase in performance which extends back in time to at least 1930 for many applications. The improvement in performance over the past 65 years can be in excess of nine orders of magnitude, while the facility cost (in adjusted terms) has not necessarily increased dramatically.