After the French Revolution erupted in 1789, Europe was thrown into chaos.
Neighboring countries' monarchs feared they would share the fate of Louis XVI, and attacked the New Republic, while at home, extremism and mistrust between factions lead to bloodshed.
In the midst of all this conflict, a powerful figure emerged to take charge of France.
But did he save the revolution or destroy it?
"Order, order, who's the defendant today?
I don't see anyone."
"Your Honor, this is Napoléon Bonaparte, the tyrant who invaded nearly all of Europe to compensate for his personal stature-based insecurities."
"Actually, Napoléon was at least average height for his time.
The idea that he was short comes only from British wartime propaganda.
And he was no tyrant.
He was safeguarding the young Republic from being crushed by the European monarchies."
"By overthrowing its government and seizing power himself?"
"Your Honor, as a young and successful military officer, Napoléon fully supported the French Revolution, and its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
But the revolutionaries were incapable of real leadership.
Robespierre and the Jacobins who first came to power unleashed a reign of terror on the population, with their anti-Catholic extremism and nonstop executions of everyone who disagreed with them.
And The Directory that replaced them was an unstable and incompetent oligarchy.
They needed a strong leader who could govern wisely and justly."
"So, France went through that whole revolution just to end up with another all-powerful ruler?"
"Not quite.
Napoléon's new powers were derived from the constitution that was approved by a popular vote in the Consulate."
"Ha!
The constitution was practically dictated at gunpoint in a military coup, and the public only accepted the tyrant because they were tired of constant civil war."
"Be that as it may, Napoléon introduced a new constitution and a legal code that kept some of the most important achievements of the revolution in tact: freedom of religion abolition of hereditary privilege, and equality before the law for all men."
"All men, indeed.
He deprived women of the rights that the revolution had given them and even reinstated slavery in the French colonies.
Haiti is still recovering from the consequences centuries later.
What kind of equality is that?"
"The only kind that could be stably maintained at the time, and still far ahead of France's neighbors."
"Speaking of neighbors, what was with all the invasions?"
"Great question, Your Honor."
"Which invasions are we talking about?
It was the neighboring empires who had invaded France trying to restore the monarchy, and prevent the spread of liberty across Europe, twice by the time Napoléon took charge.
Having defended France as a soldier and a general in those wars, he knew that the best defense is a good offense."
"An offense against the entire continent?
Peace was secured by 1802, and other European powers recognized the new French Regime.
But Bonaparte couldn't rest unless he had control of the whole continent, and all he knew was fighting.
He tried to enforce a European-wide blockade of Britain, invaded any country that didn't comply, and launched more wars to hold onto his gains.
And what was the result?
Millions dead all over the continent, and the whole international order shattered."
"You forgot the other result: the spread of democratic and liberal ideals across Europe.
It was thanks to Napoléon that the continent was reshaped from a chaotic patchwork of fragmented feudal and religious territories into efficient, modern, and secular nation states where the people held more power and rights than ever before."
"Should we also thank him for the rise of nationalism and the massive increase in army sizes?
You can see how well that turned out a century later."
"So what would European history have been like if it weren't for Napoléon?"
"Unimaginably better/worse."
Napoléon seemingly unstoppable momentum would die in the Russian winter snows, along with most of his army.
But even after being deposed and exiled, he refused to give up, escaping from his prison and launching a bold attempt at restoring his empire before being defeated for the second and final time.
Bonaparte was a ruler full of contradictions, defending a popular revolution by imposing absolute dictatorship, and spreading liberal ideals through imperial wars, and though he never achieved his dream of conquering Europe, he undoubtedly left his mark on it, for better or for worse.
Imagine an airplane flying one millimeter above the ground and circling the Earth once every 25 seconds while counting every blade of grass.
Shrink all that down so that it fits in the palm of your hand, and you'd have something equivalent to a modern hard drive, an object that can likely hold more information than your local library.
So how does it store so much information in such a small space?
At the heart of every hard drive is a stack of high-speed spinning discs with a recording head flying over each surface.
Each disc is coated with a film of microscopic magnetised metal grains, and your data doesn't live there in a form you can recognize.
Instead, it is recorded as a magnetic pattern formed by groups of those tiny grains.
In each group, also known as a bit, all of the grains have their magnetization's aligned in one of two possible states, which correspond to zeroes and ones.
Data is written onto the disc by converting strings of bits into electrical current fed through an electromagnet.
This magnet generates a field strong enough to change the direction of the metal grain's magnetization.
Once this information is written onto the disc, the drive uses a magnetic reader to turn it back into a useful form, much like a phonograph needle translates a record's grooves into music.
But how can you get so much information out of just zeroes and ones?
Well, by putting lots of them together.
For example, a letter is represented in one byte, or eight bits, and your average photo takes up several megabytes, each of which is 8 million bits.
Because each bit must be written onto a physical area of the disc, we're always seeking to increase the disc's areal density, or how many bits can be squeezed into one square inch.
The areal density of a modern hard drive is about 600 gigabits per square inch, 300 million times greater than that of IBM's first hard drive from 1957.
This amazing advance in storage capacity wasn't just a matter of making everything smaller, but involved multiple innovations.
A technique called the thin film lithography process allowed engineers to shrink the reader and writer.
And despite its size, the reader became more sensitive by taking advantage of new discoveries in magnetic and quantum properties of matter.
Bits could also be packed closer together thanks to mathematical algorithms that filter out noise from magnetic interference, and find the most likely bit sequences from each chunk of read-back signal.
And thermal expansion control of the head, enabled by placing a heater under the magnetic writer, allowed it to fly less than five nanometers above the disc's surface, about the width of two strands of DNA.
For the past several decades, the exponential growth in computer storage capacity and processing power has followed a pattern known as Moore's Law, which, in 1975, predicted that information density would double every two years.
But at around 100 gigabits per square inch, shrinking the magnetic grains further or cramming them closer together posed a new risk called the superparamagnetic effect.
When a magnetic grain volume is too small, its magnetization is easily disturbed by heat energy and can cause bits to switch unintentionally, leading to data loss.
Scientists resolved this limitation in a remarkably simple way: by changing the direction of recording from longitudinal to perpendicular, allowing areal density to approach one terabit per square inch.
Recently, the potential limit has been increased yet again through heat assisted magnetic recording.
This uses an even more thermally stable recording medium, whose magnetic resistance is momentarily reduced by heating up a particular spot with a laser and allowing data to be written.
And while those drives are currently in the prototype stage, scientists already have the next potential trick up their sleeves: bit-patterned media, where bit locations are arranged in separate, nano-sized structures, potentially allowing for areal densities of twenty terabits per square inch or more.
So it's thanks to the combined efforts of generations of engineers, material scientists, and quantum physicists that this tool of incredible power and precision can spin in the palm of your hand.
(Non English) (French) Mais Des fois on peut voir parce Que Les gens ici faire Des choses on peut manger.
(French) Mais quand tu es fâché avec quelqu'un c'est pas passé the first time.
(British English) And that's one of the things that I enjoy most about this convention.
It's not so much, as so little has to do with what everything is.
(Laughter) But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves.
(Laughter) The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living.
(Laughter) Common knowledge, but important nonetheless.
(Laughter) As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear.
It's hard to imagine or measure.
The background radiation is simply too static to be able to be seen under the normal spectral analysis.
(American accent) But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us -- you know what I'm saying?
But -- you know what I'm saying?
Because, as a hip hop thing, you know what I'm saying, TED be rocking -- you know what I'm saying.
Like so I wrote a song, and I hope you guys dig it.
It's a song about people and sasquatches -- (Laughter) And other French science stuff.
That's French science.
Okay, here we go.
(Singing) I've been trying inside I know that I'm in trouble (Applause) that I'm in trouble by myself But every time it gets me (Vocalization) (Beatbox) (Singing) And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in And you're the one that I want to be so saucy And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby And you can do anything as long as you don't get hurt along the way back (Beatbox) If I survive, I'm going to tell you what is wrong Because if you were [unclear] And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] I give you what I want to be (Music) (Music ends abruptly) (British accent) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want.
(Applause) And the computer models, no matter how many that you have and how many people that you use, are never going to be able to arrive at the same conclusions.
Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion.
(Laughter) Tomorrow is another day.
(Laughter) Not just any day, but it is a day.
It will get here, there's no question.
And the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one.
It's believable, it's tactile.
You can reach out -- things are solid.
You can move objects from one area to another.
You can feel your body.
You can say, "I'd like to go over to this location," and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location, at will.
(Laughter) That's something you live inside of every day.
Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from.
(Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin.
(Laughter) Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see.
(Laughter) (Audience) (Laughter) This is my final piece.
And just remember, everything you are -- it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be.
So please, without further ado.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) This is a fun one.
It goes like this.
(Beatbox) (Gibberish) (Music ends) Okay, for the last piece I'd like to do, this one goes very similar to this.
I hope you guys recognize it.
Here we go.
Okay, that still works.
Okay, good.
All right, here we go.
(Laughter) (Beatbox) Here we go.
(Beatbox) Yeah, yo, yo, yo (Gibberish) (Music fades out) Thank you.
Enjoy the rest.
(Applause)