Light Speed

*
Warning.

This story is not for those with weak technolibido.

It is a big development though.

And it will change the speed of a lot of things.

Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Technology
By John Markoff
New York Times
October 26, 2005-

A team of Stanford electrical engineers has discovered how to modulate, or switch on and off, a beam of laser light up to a 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.

The group used a standard chip-making process to design a key component of optical networking gear potentially more than 10 times faster than the highest-performance commercial products available today.

The team reported its discovery in the current issue of Nature, which was published on Wednesday. Such an advance could have broad applications both in accelerating the already declining cost of optical networking and in potentially transforming computers in the future by making it possible to interconnect computer chips at extremely high data rates.

Currently, the communications industry uses costly equipment to transmit data over optical fibers at up to 10 billion bits per second. However, researchers are already experimenting with optically linked computers in which components may be located on different sides of the globe.

Cheap optical switches will also make it possible to create data superhighways inside computers, making it possible to reorganize them for better performance.

"The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University.

"Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."

Several industry executives said the advance was significant because it meant that optical data networks were now on the same Moore's Law curve of increasing performance and falling cost that has driven the computer industry for the past four decades.

In 1965, the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip was doubling at regular intervals. The semiconductor industry has held to that rate of change since then, giving rise to the modern era of microelectronics that has transformed the global economy.

Now that rate of change could be directing the future of the telecommunications industry.

Computer and communications industry executives believe that advancements in inexpensive optical networks will transform the computer industry and other major industries ranging from the financial marketplace to Hollywood."

Optical circuits and computing is essential to a light based economy.

With high speed optical switching, power paints will be more efficient.

With high speed switching, existing photovoltaics might be improved.

With these high speed switches, we can harness the surrounding light.

And the world can move at light speed from

carbon to crystal.

Last night,

The author who sees the world with the same pallette

as I do,

sees a holy different scenario in response to the world's problems.

He sees a major die off of population as the solution.

In my view,

It would be proof of our failure.

Our failure to see our situation.

Our failure to see our solution.

Our failure to see our earth as one.

Our failure to move from our armaments of war.

to the arms of peace.

At light speed.



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*light speed courtesy of hideinplainwebsite