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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:fanpu2019, author: Zhang Wenzhuo

Making good use of the first principles of physics and economics is the key to the success of science and technology industrialization.

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Musk, who owns Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and many other world-famous companies, has regained the top spot on the Forbes Wealth list. The reason why he was able to achieve such a success, he revealed in an interview, is closely related to his good use of the "first principle". Affected by it, we often see many people claim that they also use the first principle, in fact, there is no lack of misuse of the first principle.

What is the first principle? The first principle comes from physics, that is, it uses the lowest physical equation of a system to calculate all the phenomena that can occur in it, so it is also called ab initio calculation. As opposed to ab intio;, Latin does not explore the laws of physics at the bottom of a system, but summarizes some laws at the phenomenal level to do some special fast calculations. Latin is ad hoc.

The first principle is widely used in physics and related fields. For relatively simple systems, people usually use first principles to calculate and get accurate results, such as calculating the structure of atoms or small molecules. The underlying physics is quantum mechanics, which can be calculated directly by quantum mechanics. For relatively large molecules, the task of using quantum mechanics as the first principle becomes onerous, and this field is called quantum chemistry, because the combination and decomposition of molecules belong to chemical reactions. but it is essentially a dynamic process dominated by quantum mechanics. The first-principles calculation of quantum chemistry requires the help of computers and special software. Due to the progress of computer software and hardware, the first principle has been further extended from quantum chemistry to the calculation of material structure and even to the calculation of biological macromolecules.

The difficulty of first-principles calculation will greatly increase with the complexity of the system, and many approximate models need to be done in the process, such as DFT, density functional theory, Monte Carlo molecular simulation and so on. For more and more complex systems, the first principle is more and more difficult to give accurate quantitative results, but it can at least give qualitative results, that is, to grasp the principal contradiction.

How Musk uses the first principle Musk uses the idea of the first principle to guide his entrepreneurship. Having majored in physics, he extended the first principle. Everything in the world should conform to the laws of physics, so in terms of technology, the laws of physics are essentially insurmountable red lines. It is impossible for a technology to challenge the laws of physics, such as perpetual motion machines, to challenge the conservation of energy. But if a technology fully follows the known laws of physics, it must be feasible. Recyclable rockets and long-range electric cars are all physically feasible.

Musk doesn't just use physics as a first principle. In business, he is also good at using the basic principles of human society as the first principle, that is, economics. In fact, many scientific and technological innovations ignore the first principle of economics. The principle of economics requires that a new technology must increase productivity by reducing costs and increasing efficiency in order to be widely used. Cost reduction and efficiency are two independent dimensions, and the new technologies acceptable to the market are the following three situations: (1) keeping efficiency unchanged or sacrificing a little efficiency while significantly reducing costs; (2) keeping costs unchanged or increasing costs a little while significantly improving efficiency; (3) significantly reducing costs and improving efficiency at the same time, this "chosen son" technology is very rare.

If there is a fourth situation, that is, a substantial increase in efficiency while significantly increasing costs, it will face very difficult marketing, and even no matter how good policies are introduced at the national level, it will not be able to industrialize it. Many emerging technologies improve efficiency at no cost, making it impossible for them to get out of the lab or serve the rich as luxury goods. Therefore, the first principle of reducing cost and increasing efficiency determines that the science and technology industry must serve the working masses.

Musk used rocket recovery technology to reduce satellite launch costs by an order of magnitude, using 1/10 quotations from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to get orders from NASA. Tesla electric vehicle also uses electric energy to reduce cost and increase efficiency compared with fossil energy. although there is a large amount of investment in the early stage, it will bring advantages from many aspects, such as energy saving and emission reduction, industrial structure and so on.

Using the first principles of economics carefully, it is easy to understand why semiconductors must continue to advance advanced processes: for integrated circuits of the same size, more and more transistors must be made on the chip. Because the chip is facing the market demand of ordinary people, we must take the road of reducing cost and increasing efficiency. Because the cost of the wafer remains the same, and the smaller the transistor, the more transistors can be produced per unit area, the lower the cost of a single transistor, and the higher the efficiency of a single chip with a fixed area.

On the contrary, the scientific and technological innovation of many sophisticated weapons is not aimed at the market demand of ordinary people, and the quantity is relatively small, so it can be manufactured regardless of cost without being bound by the first principle of economics, but it is doomed that it cannot reach the scale of the science and technology industry.

Therefore, in the science and technology industry, physical principles and economic principles are the first principles that determine whether a technology can be industrialized or not, both of which are indispensable. In his book the Origin of Innovation, Matt Ridley gives a very comprehensive understanding and analysis of the evolution of technology, and puts forward a famous saying: "people always overestimate the short-term benefits of a new technology, but underestimate its long-term impact."

When a new technology only conforms to the first principles of physics and does not conform to the first principles of economics, it is when people overestimate its short-term benefits. When this new technology is completed to reduce costs and increase efficiency, that is when people underestimate its long-term impact.

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