Moore’s Law
Etymology
Named for Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who noted the doubling trend in 1965 and revised the interval later. Despite the name, it is not a law of nature but a self-fulfilling industry prediction: chipmakers treated it as a target and organized decades of investment around meeting it. Engineers increasingly debate whether it is now slowing as transistors approach the size of atoms.
noun phrase · /MORZ LAW/
The observation that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles about every two years.
What it names
The engine of the digital age — the steady, compounding cheapness of computing that made phones, the internet, and AI possible.
Example
Thanks to Moore’s law, the phone in your pocket dwarfs the computers that guided the Apollo missions.
Related idea
Moore’s law is an empirical trend, not a rule like a physical constant — closer in spirit to Parkinson’s law than to gravity, which is why its eventual end is a matter of physics and economics, not proof.