Meet the 'Spintronics' Pioneer Who Made Google, Facebook and Amazon Possible

In the mid-90s, a physicist took a strange phenomenon of quantum mechanics and figured out how to sell it. By turning the physical effect into a practical, commercial technology, he ushered in the era of cloud computing and big data, and laid the foundation for data-driven IT giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, not to mention today's consumer electronics industry.

The scientist is Stuart Parkin, and he just won Finland's prestigious Millennium Technology Prize and its $1.3 million award, one of his many honors and distinctions over the years. The award is given out to the inventor of a technology that changed the world for the better (though that may be open for debate), and past winners include Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web and Linux Torvalds for the Linux operating system.

Parkin is hardly a household name, but his discovery affects just about every person living in the modern world, so it's worth taking a minute to understand how it works. It comes out the nanotechnology field of spintronics—spin electronics—that Parkin pioneered.

Spintronics uses the magnetic spin of electrons, rather than their charge, to store bits. The “spin” property of quantum mechanics means that instead of transmitting bits as either a 1 or a 0, it can do both at once in endless combinations.

Parkin's work built on a specific phenomenon called "giant magnetoresistance," which was actually discovered by a couple German physicists in the late 1980s, who won a Nobel prize for it several years back. Parkin gave it a practical application. He leveraged the spintronic effect to create an extremely sensitive device that can detect tiny magnetic fields—signals about 1,000 times smaller and weaker than previously possible.

The more sensitive the detector, the more data can be packed onto the drive, and the spin sensing device made it possible to manufacture atomically sized drives that could store and read thousands of times the amount of data as before. It's why we can now store a colossal amount of data and “read” it—view, stream, or listen to it—instantaneously.

IBM commercialized the technology in 1997 (Parkin is still a fellow there) and the digital storage capacity quadrupled nearly every year after that. Today, computers and data centers can hold all the information known to mankind and then some, instantly accessible from where it's stored in the cloud—effectively making today's information economy possible.

Moreover, data the storage breakthrough enabled the electronics' great shrinkage over the last decade, from dinosaur mainframe machines to computers so small you can wear them, print them, embed them under your skin, or swallow them in a pill.

"The modern world is sustained by our ability to store all our information in magnetic disk drives essentially in the cloud, so that you can instantaneously carry out Google searches, instantly stream music and movies," Parkin told the BBC. "None of those things would be possible without the immense capacities of magnetic disk drives at the very low cost that is possible today."

He's now working to leverage nanotech to crack the future of data storage, with an experimental device called "racetrack memory” that could ostensibly access data even faster than hard drive disks but cheaper than flash drive, also based on spintronics.

As IBM describes it: "A personal storage device using racetrack memory could fit into a lapel pin and record every conversation its wearer has for years before filling up. In enterprises, massive storage could be dispersed, with terabytes of information built into every device, sensor, camera and doorknob."

For better or worse, the age of ubiquitous computing is looming—perhaps it'll earn its own world-transforming award someday.