A really mean prank you can play on someone who's picky about words is to add a 'definitely->definitively' autocorrect rule to their keyboard.

At the sight of the lithography machine, my eyes mist. Oil, salt, water—human emotions are shameful contaminants. But I can't help it. I contemplate, for the millionth time, etched atoms. It's almost too much: the idea of tunneling down into a cluster of atoms and finding art there.

I'm prepared both for a climax and for an anticlimax, but my experience is not on that continuum at all.

As late as the 1960s, electrical engineers were still dropping black wax onto blocks of germanium and etching away at it. Not a bad way to fit four or eight transistors on a chip, but as the number rose to millions, billions, and now even trillions, the components became first more invisible than wax and then much, much smaller than merely invisible. Along the way, engineers started etching with light.

Several people at TSMC told me their work at arguably the most powerful company on the planet is "unsexy." One told me that girls don't fall for TSMC engineers, but their mothers do. Invisible as suitors. Indispensable as husbands.

"If you think about conflicts around Taiwan," Tooze told Klein, "the global semiconductor industry isn't just the supply chain. It's one of humanity's great technological scientific achievements. Our ability to do this stuff at nanoscale is us up against the face of God, in a sense."

Indeed, just as esoteric symbols transform banal cotton-linen patches into dollar bills, cryptic latticework layered onto morsels of common silicon—using printmaking techniques remarkably similar to the ones that mint paper money—turns nearly valueless material into the building blocks of value itself. This is what happens at TSMC.

I arrive in Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

I walk very slowly. The white humming machines are featureless, and thick hermetic glass stands between me and the fathomless nano-processes that I couldn't have perceived with my crude pupils anyway. It dawns on me at once that the machines resemble incubators in a neonatal intensive care unit. Inside them, something very fragile flickers between existence and whatever comes before existence. Tiny souls that must be protected from less than a nano of gas are surely immunocompromised. I picture the transistors as trembling bodies with translucent skin and fast, shallow breaths. They are utterly dependent on adults who cherish them for their extraordinary smallness and cosmic potential. What's present here is preciousness. To see the fabs is to feel a full-body urge to keep the tiny marvelous creations—newborns—and then humanity as a whole—alive.