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IBM Slows the Speed of Light
dptalia writes "According to an article on ZDNet, IBM has come up with a way to slow light to 1/300 of its normal speed. While this has been done in laboratories before, IBM has found out how to do this using standard materials, which opens the possibility of mass production. This means that the dream of having optical based CPUs may be closer than previously thought." From the article: "When the optical conversion might start to occur is a matter of speculation. Luxtera has said it will start to commercially produce products in 2007. The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers. A paper providing details on the chip will run in Nature on Wednesday."
The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers.
It is all just a matter of compatibility. If one company manages to make an optical Hard Disk which interface is the same SATA or IDE, and which is affordable of course, then it will surely be a great replacement for the current slow disks.
The same goes for RAM, or motherboards. As long as they continue providing the same connecting interfaces (and are backwards compatible) they wont have any problem getting into the market.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Can somebody please give me a useful application for this?
Generally, in computer chips, the hard part is speeding them up. Slowing things down is easy. What does this new tech buy us?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I'm not sure this technology can be pushed in that direction...Doesn't seem like they're so much slowing it down as making it take more time to get from point A to point B...fine distinction I know.
But since light traveling in a vacuum isn't really being impeded by anything, I don't know how we could speed it up, except maybe by finding some way to "flatten" the waveform without destroying it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That hardly proves that it can't be done; people used to see no way that a plane could possibly go faster than sound.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
When the speed of light gets slowed down, so does the delay between an image appearing on a computer monitor and it hitting the retinas of the observer of said monitor, much to the dismay of the aforementioned teenagers.
As if waiting for the download to finish weren't boring enough ...
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
People also don't know how to make unicorns, doesn't mean they'll figure it out.
If I'm using light in a CPU, why do I want to slow it down? Is there some reason why I really want to decrease bandwidth and/or increase latency?
The wavelength of an electron is extremely tiny compared to the wavelength of light. This means that feature sizes for light based chips are necessarily much larger than those for electron based chips. Barring some advancement that allows us to pack more functionality per unit area into an optical chip, optical computing will remain a very niche field.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Yes. The point was that there needs to be a distinction made between "speed of light" and "amount of time it takes for light to travel a certain distance."
Actually, the sound-barrier analogy is misleading. For the speed of sound, people KNEW that things could exceed that speed long before we got planes to do it. The issue was one of technology: could we build a plane to withstand the stress?
For the speed of light issue, it's a different. If you believe Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, you just can't exceed that speed. At least not if you start below light speed and remain in this universe. There's a very clear physical law that prohibits this, not a concern about technology being up to the task.
Of course, the law might be wrong. Or there may be ways of side-stepping it. In fact, I'm giving a whole planetarium talk this very evening on that very issue.
In the same way that Jesse Owens with a twisted ankle is faster than Fat Albert.
We want optical computers because light is fast. Now we slow light down. So doesn't that just defeat the whole exercise?
I guess there's going to be a lot of overclocking.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
which is science. Blind postulates are not.
No, it's just a standard measurement, it uses the constant c, which is the speed of light in a vacuum. It doesn't matter if the light moves faster or slower between the two objects, the distance remains constant.
Most of the time the light would still be operating on the good old light speed. But for it to work in computers you still would have to slow it down in places and even stop it. For example to let another beam of light to pass before it can go through.
I don't quite see where you're getting this idea from. It's a bit barmy to imagine current electonic processors firing two lines at the same time and then having an 'electron traffic light' to let one signal pass by making another wait. This may sound like a switch but it's not, because at no point are you actually 'stopping' electrons. If you don't produce a voltage your electrons aren't going to move in a current, so you haven't stopped them because you never fired them to start with. As i'm sure you realise, in digital electronics data transmission is acheived by voltage state. Changing state from 0 to 1 happens because you apply a voltage, and 0 to 1 because you stop applying it. With photonics, the equivalent must be turning the source on and off?
It may be beyond my knowledge of physic's but slowing down light within an optical processor (to better interface with other devices or traditional electronics or whatever) sounds like an alternative to having light signals running at a lower frequency (more time spent in each state so peripherals can spot signals). Slowing down light and introducing a delta velocity surely means we need a way to buffer light, much like a capacitor stores charge?
If General Relativity is wrong, it is very good wrong because there are a lot of things it predicts very accurately in the real world. Also, ``wrong'' isn't probably the right term, the right term is ``inaccurate under certain conditions''.
Newton's theory of gravity isn't totally wrong (it is still used where it doesn't matter since it's so simple), it just fails to explain certain things, which General Relativity can explain very accurately.
Your first statement (that our consciousness creates the universe), that I believe is correct, doesn't imply the second.
The problem is that our creation of the universe is apparently restricted by limits that are intrinsic to it and necessary in order for that creation of the universe. Among those is the fabric of space-time which is necessary for perception to occur, and thus for specific consciousness to exist.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
In this case though it might be a case of people not seeing how something can go faster than a maximum speed. The alternative to a maximum speed is an infinite speed. Special Relativity can be seen as a consequence of the existance of a maximum speed in nature (and widely regarded as an accurate one). Any inertialess (massless) particle, like light, would travel at this speed. So, in other words, the maximum speed is that of light in a vacuum.
Now consider what anything faster would imply: It either implies that the maximum speed doesn't exist (inertialess particles travel with infinite speed) or that the maximum speed is higher (and therefore light must have some inertia).
Also, and as far as I am aware, it's impossible to measure changes in the speed of light. Regardless of what it is; all physical effects remain identical. Consider that any measurements using meters and seconds will always agree with a constant value because we define the speed of light and don't measure it. The assumption here is that there is nothing in nature that can provide a better benchmark.
Who ordered that?
Some Discworld mages have reasoned that since you can see the light pouring down the valleys, there must therefore be a second, faster kind of light. But nobody listens to them anyway.
Bingo. Today we have chemical batteries of all kinds for storing electricity. We have nothing to store photons. How will optical processors be supplied with photons to do their work? LEDs? What device will be controlling the LEDs to make them turn on and off at the high frequencies needed to produce useful pulses of light? Transistors? What will be so special about those transistors that lets them switch the LEDs on and off at sufficiently fast frequencies, that we wouldn't just use those transistors for electrical logic signaling in the first place?
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...