I found the bits that I did understand fascinating in this presentation by R. Stanley Williams from hp.
It seems that even small fields are huge in the nano, and the rise of understanding memristance and the production and application of memristors is going to change things quite a bit.
Williams says that memristance “… is more important at the nanometer scale than it is at the micrometer scale. And at the millimeter scale it’s completely unobservable.”
He continues later by describing memristance: “It is the coupled motion of atom and electrons in a device. Anytime you get that, you have memristance.”
Like I said, mostly over my head. But being able to manipulate that correlation into some sort of state variable in nano-electronics is just about the most kickass thing I’ve heard in a while.
That, and learning about Leon Chau is me recognizing that I have no idea how big my blind spot is in physics and double e.