The Lighter Side of Tech

have you heard of Moore's law? Moore's Law? We've talked about it on this very podcast so many times now, so I guess that means you have, in fact heard of it. I've heard of it. I've talked about it. In fact, I know a lot of interesting things about it, like, for example, the fact that it's not really a law,

is it. No, it's an observation. Gordon Moore made this observation in a paper that and I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't write it down in my notes, but it had something to do with something like cramming more components

on a silicon chip is something along those line. But he was essentially observing that because of improvements in manufacturing processes and the fact that they were able to find uses for more powerful microprocessors, that we were seeing a doubling of the number of components on a chip every two years or so. It all depends upon the era that you look at Moore's law. It can go from as little as twelve months to as long as two years. I think it. I think it started as a year

and has extended now. But the generalization often is like eight every eighteen months or so. Some people might say, um, you should see in the way this manifest practically is a doubling in computer power, Yes, computer processing power. So while it may not be a physical doubling of actual components on a microprocessor, the outcome now is that it's

a doubling of the microprocessors computing power. This this is all about, how you know, through the entire history of what is known as Moore's law, we have tweaked the definition to suit whatever the current state was. That's true, we have extended the time period a little bit. But it is worth noting that this prediction has been remarkably consistent. Yes, and some people might say that it's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy that, but by stating this observation, it

has helped us. Uh, not us like Jonathan and I, but much smarter people, computer scientists, much more educated and capable people, really keep this thing going, right. It's it's it's kind of a goal for people who work in the computer's field to say, look, we want to keep this this prediction true. We want to make sure that the devices that we're designing in two years time are going to be twice as powerful as the ones we're

designing today. Therefore, we've got this goal to shoot for, and it means making some pretty amazing leaps and engineering. Of course, the sad thing about worse law is that the honeymoon can't last forever. Yeah. So Moore's law is one of those things that has been predicted to be on death's door ever since the probably nineteen eighties, maybe even earlier. Yeah, and it hasn't been so far, but we know that at some point it has to, at least if we're going to be building our computers based

upon the same architecture that we've been using up till now. Right, And so there are a lot of different things that you might sort of notice will end up working against Moore's law. One of them, I think is just sort of a funny observation that has been consistent for a while now. It's referred to as pages law. I think it was coined by Sergey Brynn Right of Google. Uh, it may have been. I'm not familiar with the actual

origin of it. I do know what the law is, however, I think it was well, yeah, so what is the law. The law is that as we get more powerful hardware, software will rise to meet the challenge to make that hardware just as slow as what we're used to exactly. So it's like if every eighteen months your computer hardware, you know, a new computer will get twice as fast,

every eighteen months software gets twice as slow. Right, the software becomes more complex, more bloated, so that crammed with features you don't want that I could take longer to execute. And this maybe one explanation for why it just seems like that computer that used to be so speedy is really sluggish now, or or even just that the brand new computer you bought is as fast as the brand

new computer you bought two years ago. It's just now it's running software that's two years further along as well, So everything has evened out. The playing field has not changed at all. In other words, if software manufacturers made a product and then never updated it, so it was the same. Like, let's say that there's a productivity suite that you like and it has never been updated. It's the same suite year after year after year. You can still get it, but it's no different than it was

when it premiered. Your computer would run that it was nothing. It would be just lightning fast. But that's not the way the world works. In order to make money, these these companies continue to upgrade their software, which means that you are now running a more um complicated, bloated you might say, software suite, and it runs just as quickly

or slowly. There's your features, Jonathan, their features. They make it better, right because because more is always better, right, Like, so I definitely want to have that feature that no person ever in the history of mankind has ever actually used, but I want to be there just because that way I have the option. Yeah. So there is pages law, and that's been tracking More's law for a while now. But there are also some physical limitations More's law might encountered.

So not just imposed by over ambitious or greedy software developers, but by the laws of physics themselves. Yeah. So one of those is called dinnered scaling or Denard scaling, depending upon how you prefer to pronounce it. Right. Well, technically we're talking about not denards scaling, but the end of right. So this scaling is all about the way these these

microprocessors receive power. Right. And then as long as uh, the scaling holds true, then the amount of power we need to keep these micro transistors working microprocessors rather not transistors working, will will be neck connect so that the development will maintain, so we continue to have optimal efficiency as far as we can based upon electronics. Yeah, it should be obvious, but I guess worth saying. The chip in your computer is an electronic device. It needs electrons

flowing through it to work. Yeah. So here's the issue. The problem is that once we got to having components of a certain size. Remember the whole idea here is that we're maturizing components so that we can fit more of them into the same physical space. Right. Your laptop doesn't get twice as fast becoming twice as big because

twice as fast staying the same size. Right, And that's because we have managed to find new architectures that either either use the the features that we have designed more effectively, or they have decreased the size of those individual components so that you can fit more of them onto the chip. This, by the way, is similar to the tik talk approach with Intel. Intel calls their development TikTok. The tick is

when they end up creating brand new majorized components. The talk is when they have figured out the ideal architecture to lay out those components so that they are at their most efficient. Each ends up meaning that you get a boost in your computer's performance. The first is just because it's just got more power, more horsepower in a sense. The second is because you have, uh, you have optimized the layout so that you get the most out of

that horse power. Well, the problem with this Denard scaling coming to an end is that once you get to transistors below ninety nanometers in size, which we're already there, um, you start getting electrical current leakage issues, which means that the efficiency overall of your system decreases. So maybe, so that's saying like, even if you could continue shrinking the chip, you might not be getting a return on that exactly, and that would tie right back into Gordon Moore's observation.

He had said that this was really an element of manufacturing and economics and less of some sort of innate, you know law that that guides computers becoming twice as powerful over a set amount of time. He was saying that it only holds true if the manufacturing processes and the economic returns makes sense. If they no longer make sense,

the law falls flat. So it may come a time where, because the efficiency has dropped to such a point, it doesn't make sense for us to make electronic components any smaller, even if we are able to. So we might say, you know, engineering wise, we can make a microchip that has even smaller components, but because of electrical leakage, it's not going to perform any better than the chips we already have. Therefore, it makes no sense to actually do that.

But Jonathan, Yeah, what about a crazy alternative. I like that you did jazz hands. Is this like a musical? Like like, we have computers that sing. I do them because the listeners cannot see them, and it brings me pleasure to have that secret. Okay, sorry, I I just ignore that. Listeners just pretend like I didn't say anything. Okay, this crazy alternative is today's microchip architecture, and our transistors are based on electronics. So you're you're using electrons, these

little particles that are part of an atom. That's the same way all our other electronics. So negative to h your puns are strong. Okay, what if instead of using electronics we turned our attention to photonics. Oh so you're talking about fundamental particles of light, right, so instead of messing around with electrons, you mess around with photons. That is an interesting idea that a lot of people are very, very smart people are concentrating on right now. Yes, I

want to clarify this transition. It was not my idea. It is something we have read about. Yes, this is something that we wanted to talk about because it's really an exciting proposition, especially for certain types of computing. It may it may turn out that there's never a practical way for this to become like the average computers architecture. On the other hand, it could very well become the future of computing. It could, it could. It's really early

to say. Right now. The feel this still developing. We we are still working on creating the fundamental building blocks that this sort of computer system would depend upon in order for it to work as we understand computers to work today. And here's part of the issue before we even get into all the details. Part of the problem is that we've we've really written that electronic computer train

really far right. We have advanced to such a point that in order to transition to a completely different computing platform, or at least a different architecture, we would need to have that architecture be advanced to the point where it could at least be a lateral move uh initially and then to continue to develop in order for Moore's law to remain at all relevant or at least, you know,

applicable in some way. So, oh, I see, so like it would be very frustrating if there were a twenty year gap in Moore's law while we're waiting for for potonic computers to catch up to electronics, right, we would we would essentially have plateaued with electronic computers. We would not be able to really get measurably faster. We might be able to do some tweaking here and there, and we'll talk about some at least one alternative towards the end.

Of this episode to photonics. That could have us see some some development continue using a tweak on traditional architecture. But it would mean that we would see a cease in the rapid escalation of microprocessor performance until photonics got fast enough so that it could take over and be the next new thing. And maybe that both are working in parallel for a while. Um, we don't know, because photonics still are relatively young when it comes to optical computers.

But we have been working in photonics for decades. Oh yeah, I mean you have already interacted almost definitely with tons of photonic devices. One of the big ones I would like to bring up is just optical fiber. Absolutely so it's really becoming like an industry standard. Yeah. I come from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the the electric powerboard, the local one has optical fiber to the home. Uh. It's people love it there. It's super super fast, awesome throughput. It

is a good system. People are really happy with it. Yeah. So optical fiber. Uh, this is this is kind of what has provided sort of a foundation for the photonics industry. The two two big developments that happened in the twentieth century that have made photonics a an interesting area of study was the development of lasers and the development of optical fiber. So fiber optics are it's phenomenal in that you can really find creative ways to transmit data, multiple

data streams across a single optical fiber simultaneously. And if you think about just how optical fiber works, it's kind of amazing. I mean talking about beaming these uh, these wave particle pulses of light, pulses of light refracting through a tiny essentially like a glass kind of cord across miles and miles. It's really strange. So so you've essentially

covered the basis. It's the idea of you've got I mean, if you want to be really really simple, if you were to really boil this down to a very simple idea, imagine that, uh, that you and a friend are standing across from a football field and you have created a code. Let's even say it's just Morse code. You haven't created it,

you're just relying on Morse code. You each have a flashlight, uh, and you flashed the light on and off in uh in you know, using the code as your basis, and you send messages to each other essentially with a fiber optic cable. You have a very high tech version of this, although it gets a lot more complex. So you have emitters and sensors on either end that are converting these

light messages back into electronic messages. Or take an electronic message converted to light, send it across the optical fiber, where when it gets to its destination it converts back into electric messages so that a computer can understand it. Right.

So the neat thing is not only does this travel at the speed of light across that optical fiber, not only do you not have to worry so much about interference with other types of signals because photons are pretty good about not getting mixed up with that kind of thing. They're not into, you know, being influenced by the wrong crowd. You don't have to worry about electromagnetic interference with photons.

The other cool thing is that you can use different polarities of light, because you know light you can polarize in different ways, or you can even use different wavelengths of light, which we perceive as color right in the visible spectrum. Anyway, you can use different wavelengths of light, and then you can transmit multiple messages across the same optical fiber simultaneously and they and interfere with each other.

Photons won't mess with other photons, so you could have you know, ten different streams of data going across one single optical fiber. You could even have it going in both directions at once. It's bidirectional, so you could have this communication going on. It's superspeeds. That's why you're able to get that huge data throughput. So the neat thing is that we've even seen cables for computers come out

using this technology. Things. Uh, the original development name was light Peak, and then Apple bought it and and rebranded it as Thunderbolt, So the initial Thunderbolt cables, I believe we're all still copper. But the plan was to move to fiber optics using this technology, where you could do multi threading through fiber optics and have really rapid data transfers like twenty gigabytes in just a couple of seconds.

It's crazy how fast we're talking. Now, what if see you still have a slow point, You still have a bottleneck at either end of that cable, right because you still have to convert the electricity to light and on the other end, convert that light back into electricity so that it can communicate with our devices. Because our devices

rely on electronic transistors. But if we could change that, if we could make the fundamental components of our devices communicate through light rather than through electricity, everything we had would have that kind of throughput. It would be kind of like having a universal currency instead of having to go to the exchanger. Yeah, it would just mean that everything would be able to move at this incredible rate

with these incredible options. But again you'd have to figure out, all, right, how do we achieve that, how do we build these fundamental blocks that we've depended upon. I mean, the development of the transistor dates back to the nineteen fifties, and then we've seen the transistor improve over time since then. So we would essentially have to reinvent the transistor. And people, by the way, have done that with photonics instead of with electricity. Okay, so I'm trying to imagine the photonic

computer or the future. I'd assume you'd still base it on some kind of binary and coding of data, right, So unless you were going to completely change computer science and information theory. Unless you were to go to a point where you say, all right, well let's abandon boolean logic, let's abandon the basis for computers and create something entirely new. Then what the most logical approach is to say, how can we achieve a boolean logic based computer system but

use photonic equipment rather than electronic equipment. That sounds kind of fancy, but what that really really boils down to is inside your computer, everything is a matter of a long series of on and off switches. Yes, those transistors, and those transistors are what we're essentially talking about as on off switches. Their gates that allow the flow of electrons in an electronic based system, but it would be

photons in an optical based system. It would be a gate that would either allow photons to pass through or would prevent them in some way in order for it to still represent that one or zero, that bit. That is the basis of information theory in the modern computing age. So you would have to rebuild those basic components you find in computers, things like transistors, which if you arrange transistors in a proper way, you can create logic gates.

This is like the and or nor If you ever study any basic logic, these are the basic functions that allow you to make statements and then evaluate those statements to get to the proper conclusions. That's the basis of computing today. That's exactly how computers work. So you would have to be able to make those logic gates using

these photonic elements. Uh, and so right now, the state of the art as it stands today is all about trying to find new ways to create those those fundamental components that will make up an optical computer and be useful. Like we we've seen several several developments that are really interesting, but they are mostly proof of concept things that wouldn't be practical. I guess one of the big issues has

got to be miniaturization. That would drinking it down. That's exactly right, Yeah, getting these components to be really, really tiny. I mean you're talking about like when you're talking about a microprocessor. Just think about those tiny computer chips you've seen, and keep in mind that the components, the individual components on that chip are at forty five nanometers or even smaller.

And a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. So you're talking about billions of components on a single microprocessor. Now you have to create something that can emit light and sense light, and and be able to to essentially do that without becoming an enormous machine. So, in other words, a lot of the work that's done in labs, you might be able to create system that is a good

proof of concept. But what if you if you made an entire computer that was of equivalent power to one of today's PCs using that technology, it would go back to the old days where your basic computer was the size of a building. So that would mean that it wouldn't be terribly practical on your next business trip. So who's actually built like a photonic transistor so far? Well, early works started in the nineteen eighties, so there have been a lot of people who have worked on it

in various ways. But one of the more recent interesting stories was about some researchers that they might t back in July of two thousand and thirteen, they built an all optical transistor that could switch between zero and one using a single photon. So we're not talking about a beam of light, we're not talking about a laser beam.

We're talking about one photon. Remember that a photon represents a particle of light, but that light connect both as a particle and a wave, which means it has some quantum uh features, some features we're talking about stuff when I say some quantum features, essentially, be prepared to have

your mind bent. Yeah. The best way to understand this if you're not familiar with this concept is just to like go on the internet and look up the double slit experiment right where you know the is that's certainly a mind bending experiment where you know things that you know, you would think, you know, you would think it should behave a certain way and always behave that way, and

it turns out that's that's not right. So in this particular implementation, what they had was to a pair of mirrors, okay uh, and the mirrors could perform in two different ways.

When it was in the on position, let's say that's that represents a one in bit language, a photon could pass straight through both mirrors the pair of mirrors that are placed very closely together, extremely closely, as I'll mention in a second, when it's in the off position, only to any percent of the light would actually pass through the mirrors. In other words, the photon would get bounced back. A single photon would not make it through. And here's

the reason why this works. Light does behave both as a particle on a wave. Now, if it acted only as a particle, it wouldn't matter whether the switch was on or off. It would encounter that first mirror and bounce off. It would be like you know, you running out a wall. You're not You're never not going to bounce off that wall unless the walls made of something really weak and you crash through cool a man style. But let's say let's say it's a cinder block solid wall.

You would kind of splat slash bounce off of it. It would not be pleasant. However, light also acts as a wave, and so if you were to look at a wavelength of light, the electromagnetic field of a single photon would overlap the two mirrors because the mirrors are placed so that they are the same distance apart as a wavelength of whatever light you're using. So so, different types of light have different wavelengths, like different colors. One

one color has a longer wavelength of light than another. Yes, if you look at the the roy g biv spectrum, like a rainbow, red to violet. When you're on the red side, those are the longer wavelengths. The further along you get in that spectrum, the shorter the wavelengths are. At any rate, you would have to have these two mirrors placed at the wavelength that corresponds to that particular

type of light. If you did that, and you you know you had this properly set up, when that switches on, the electron would pass through as if nothing were there, because the wavelength completely overlaps the distance of those two mirrors, So it acts on a quantum level like there's nothing there. Uh, there's no, there's no counterpart to this. On the macro level.

We can't have a version of Joe running at that cement wall where Joe passes through the wall as if nothing were there, because Joe only acts like a particle, not like a wave. Okay, So, as freaky as this is, it's not the only way to manipulate light for logic gates at the scale. Right, that's right, because you could do something. See again, one of the big issues here is maturization. Right, how do you manaturize these mirrors and lasers so that you can manipulate light in this way?

One other way you could take this approach is by developing something called meta materials meta materials. Yeah, so meta materials are man made. They're really really awesome. Okay, so meta materials are way are materials that interact with electromagnetic radiation in interesting ways, and it's all based on the physical structure of the material, right, So when we say they're synthetic, of course we don't mean they're made of

synthetic atoms. They're made of natural atoms. But there can be made of anything, really, I mean, some some do certain jobs better than others. But what's really cool about the materials is the chemical composition doesn't matter so much as the physical structure of the material, right. It's how they're put together. It's the actual Like, if you were able to zoom in on a nano level of these materials,

you would see certain repeated patterns. It would be kind of like think of it like a scaffold, but it's a scaffold that extends out in three dimensions, so you would see these repeated patterns. Those repeated patterns would be what gives the meta materials whatever particular function they happen to have, and they can have different ones, depending upon

the way you structure these things. In general, if you create a meta material that has a structure where the repeating patterns are smaller than the wavelength of whatever light you're using, that light can pass through the meta materials as if it weren't there. This is also, by the way, the basis for a lot of cloaking technology, but that cloaking technology tends to be focused on microwaves because microwaves

are even longer than visible light. Yeah, the problem is getting the meta materials small and densely packed enough to interact with things that have these tiny wavelengths. Right, And if if you wanted to have a cloaking device that managed to cloak against all visible light, that'd be really tricky because again, visible light takes up a spectrum of wavelengths. Right, So you could in theory make a really effective cloaking device that cloaks you against a particular hue of red.

So that would mean that uh, you know, red light would pass through, but other light would bounce back, so you would you know, you would still see everything, but red in whatever reflected back. Well, I can't know. I don't know if we can predict exactly what it would look like it would look very weird. You would see a bizarre site. Well, all the red light would pass through it, but the other light would behave just as

light normally would on such an object. Right, I'm just saying, I don't know what that would end up looking like to your eyes. I guess it all depends on what look like before you started messing with the meta materials. At any rate, there are some researchers who hope that they can use meta materials in photonics, which would also lead to improvements in miniaturization because you wouldn't have to

worry about seating these tiny little mirrors. You would instead create these tiny what would appear to be solid objects, but would be made in such a way that light could pass through them when they were aligned properly. Yeah. I actually read I thought a really interesting article about

some research that was published just this month. It was out of the uh Well, it was from researchers at the Australian National University, and they published a paper in Nature Communications called Spontaneous chiral symmetry Breaking in Meta Materials, and a couple of the authors were interviewed about the paper in an article for fiz Org where they talked about the discovery. So they built this material that was capable of rotating the polarization of light. You were talking

about that earlier. And in order to make photonic devices like computer chips, you need to be able to control the properties of tiny amounts of light, and one of those properties is its polarization. The cool thing that these A and YOU researchers were able to come up with was a material that would respond to a beam of light, so they could control the behavior of the meta material by shining light on it or not. In other words, the effects the polarization of light switching could be turned

on or off with the beam of light. That means minute direct control of the effect of this meta material structure, and I think that's really cool. Like one of the authors of the paper was interviewed about it, and his name was Dr David Powell, and he said, it's another completely new tool in the toolbox for processing light thin slices. These materials can replace bulky collections of lenses and mirrors.

This miniaturization could lead to the creation of more compact opto electronic devices, such as a light based version of the electronic transistor so I think that's really cool and making these little, uh sort of light controlled machines on this tiny, tiny level. Yeah. One one thing we do also have to point out is that it's generally accepted in the field of photonics. And I say that by you know, kind of distancing myself from this, because obviously

I am not an expert in these things. I have to take the information I read and try and judge its veracity as much as I can. You know. On that note, I will say, for some reason, I find photonics one of the most difficult scientific subjects. Well, we research, we talked about all different kinds of subjects. We're experts in none but but, but optical physics seems to be one of the most difficult of all the different fields. It's quantum. It's so quantum. That's so quantum. One of

my favorite shows in the nineties. Uh they what were you saying? Well, I was going to say that one of the things that's generally accepted is that you have a limitation here in the sense that light has set wavelengths, right, you cannot change those wavelengths. That's that's a property of light. So different colors of light, of a different wavelength. Like we mentioned, UH, generally speaking, visible light is between one hundred nanometers and a thousand nanometers or or a micrometer

in size. That's that's generally speaking, the the spectrum of light that falls into the visible range, although you probably would say more like between four hundred and seven hundred nanometers to be uh to be fair. Now too, that means that the components for photonics can only get down to about half the length of any given wavelength for the light that's working with. Below that, it doesn't work, So you are limited in how small you can get

with photonics. That's important to keep in mind because electronic components have already reached to below that size. We're talking about forty five nanometers. So if we can only get these elements to be half the length or half the size of the wavelength, then we're limited at how small we can get these photonic components. Right. We can't get

them any smaller than that. If you're talking about a couple hundred uh nanometers in wavelength, than a hundred nanometers as small as you can get, and we already have microprocessors that have smaller components than that on them. Which means that the photonics have to be better at processing information than the electronics are, or we have that plateau effect, right, we don't end up making progress. We either step backward

or we're treading water. So that is one thing to keep in mind, is that we may have a limit on how how many components we can cram into an electronic device. Now we may find better ways of engineering it so that we make better use of these physical properties of light, and therefore we get better efficiency and better processing power out of it. This again is that idea of optimizing what you have so that it works

the best way possible. And frankly, we are still working on the basics here, so it may be that, you know, fifteen years down the line, we are still coming up with new ways to manipulate light and make it more efficient for our our computing purposes, where we still have Moore's law going in full effect. It's just now it's

applying to photonics, not electronics. It's also possible that we could just make a huge leap frog and go into like super crazy efficient computers, which really puts the pressure on those software engineers to to bloat it up key pace so many features that you hate. So like, let me show you how many different versions of comic sands we have in this word processing suite. I I just in the future, I imagine that all software, all native software, will just have a little streaming video box up at

the top corner. Right. Yeah, Well another interesting I mean talk about getting into subjects where we are interested but ultimately don't really understand. I want to talk about um spasers, spasers. Spasers. Yeah, that's spasers. It stands for surface plasma amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, which I clears it all up, doesn't it. Yes, So technically these are not nanoscale lasers, although that that

is often how they are referred to. Uh, they are a think of it as an interface that exchanges a resonating electron for photon and vice versa. And so you have, uh, you have this this component that sends resoning electrons through a substrate. Substrate is basically your foundation through which all stuff can travel. It's it's kind of like the basis

that you build upon. So in general, spasers, which have been worked on for years, were only able to use things like quantum dots, which pretty uh pretty exotic material you could say, or um, precious metals that have been reduced to nanoparticle size in order to have this resonating electron be useful in any way, not terribly practical when you want to come to like a large scale computing industry.

But recent work over at Monash University's Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering made a substrate from graphing one of our favorite materials, that's the sheet of carbon atoms that it's one atom thick oh carbon. And also, can you guess what the resonator is if the substrate is graphing, what could the resonator be? You got it in one, dude, I didn't even put it in the notes. And yes, in fact, carbon nanotube and graphing pairing is what allows

this stuff to work. Uh So, the cool part about this is that it could, in fact, assuming that we find really efficient ways of of manufacturing graphing and carbon nanotubes, be a great advance in a basic photonic element that

could make this kind of future of shot income. True, um, it doesn't mean you have to rely so much on these other more exotic materials, but you know that's still years down the line before we get to a point where that's that's something that is readily manufacturable, but it does hold promise. Now, we've already talked on this podcast before about another type of alternative to your standard old

school electronic computer, which is quantum computers. I wonder is the photonic computer going to be something that operates alongside a quantum computer or helps us build a quantum computer. There are or or what there are? Certain um There are a lot of different implementations of quantum computers, at least on paper, that would rely on photonics, that would use photons in various ways to encode information. You might remember we had our Cryptically Quantum episode which published on

June fourteen. That was the one where we talked about quantum crypto aography being able almost did and I stopped myself. Yeah, I still do that, and I know it's wrong. Keep telling me that's wrong, people, because that's the only way I'm gonna learn. Uh. No, quantum cryptography where you use the different polarizations of light in order to create a private key and share it with someone else. Uh, photonics

are going to play a big role in that. We talked about how it kind of has limitations right now, but improvements in photonics could see us developed that further so that you can actually use that on a wide network as opposed to uh, kind of regionally locked within a certain a certain number of kilometers. I think it

was thirty kilometers before I started to fall apart. Um. Of course, it could come down to their just basic laws of quantum physics that we can't get around, and then in that case it may be a limiting factor, or it will be a limiting factor, but we don't know that yet. We also talked about quantum computers in an episode called from Cubert to Cubits, which is published onto Smerwyn't thirteen. So I think that was just about

quantum computers, wouldn't it. I remember one of the things we talked about is that quantum computers might not They might be very very useful for certain types of tasks, but in other ways might not really offer any advantages over a traditional computer. So it's not like necessarily every computer in the future is going to be a quantum computer. Quantum computers are really good for certain types of computer problems, UH, computer problems that can be divided up and solved in

parallel in particular, would be ideal for quantum computers. That's the kind of stuff that they can solve very, very rapidly. It's the stuff that classical computers tend to have a lot of trouble doing. You have to usually add more computer cores processing cores, whether it's a multi core processor or networking a bunch of computers together to work on

a problem. It's usually the approach you have to take in order to make something like that, uh take, you know, not require an unreasonable amount of time to solve the problem. Quantum computers are very good for that. They're not so good for basic computing. I mean they perform like a regular classic computer. And the number of cubits those are quantum bits that your quantum computer has determines its ability of how how well does it solve these huge problems.

But while you can get away with relatively few cubits compared to the the processing power you've seen in a classical computer and still tackle those huge problems, it would mean to be a pretty slow computer for anything like I don't know, playing the latest Call of Duty. It wouldn't be any better. In fact, it probably be worse than your general like off the shelf PC, Well, what

a rip off? Stopped developing these things. But look, I'm sorry that this thing that could render all existing cryptography useless isn't uh, isn't good enough for you to play, you know, your first person shoter. I apologize. Okay. So if we were able to build powerful photonic computers and sort of that could compete with good electronic computers, how would they compare in terms of energy efficiency? That's a

great question, and it's one that's really hard to answer. Uh. Until recently, the general consensus was that a photonic computer would require as much power, if not more power, than a comparable electronic machine. So it would mean that in some senses it would be inferior to an electronic computer because you would actually have to to feed it more power. But there are more recent reports on developments and photonic technologies that suggests that perhaps it could be very power efficient,

maybe more so than electronic computers. So it may be that the photonic computers we get down the line, assuming that this all works out, will actually require less power than a you know, a comparable electronic computer, or maybe there is no elect comparable electronic computer. Maybe that the photonic com eaters are so efficient and so great at a processing that there's nothing in our electronic world that

compares to it. It's too early to say. Okay, so I want to ask a sort of prediction question, but this might actually have a pretty solid answer. Imagine we make the transition to photonic computers. Does that mean More's law can go on forever? Again? Hard to say. It would mostly depend upon again learning the best way to manipulate that light. Because we are limited by physics, we cannot make those components smaller and smaller and smaller. I mean,

we're limited by the wavelengths of light. Just with electricity, we're limited by how small each individual component can become before we start having electrical leakage. We are limited with how small we can make photonic components before you no longer can manipulate the light itself because the wavelengths are too long. Which is hard to imagine that a wavelength of light would be too long to manipulate, but in fact, if you get down to that level, it becomes that

way you could switch. You can make an ultra violet laser. Ultra Violet light has incredibly small wavelengths, and we do have ultra violet lasers excisor lasers, but UH to be able to translate that over the photonics would require a lot of work. What you're saying is eventually we're going to need to have gamma ray computers. I think eventually. Eventually, once we get down to the maximum that we can, uh,

we can exploit I guess that's the best word for it. Light, we'll either have to figure out an entirely different way to compute, or we'll just have to be satisfied that we've plateaued and we won't get any faster, which would mean that you know that that would have huge impact on multiple industries, right that you If you said this is this is as good as it can get because of the way our universe works, we literally cannot make it faster because we have hit the limitations of the

universe itself. Then you you realize, well, we have to make do with what we have. It doesn't mean that the future won't still be amazing. It just might take longer to get here. You know what I've just figured out. So all those old sci fi movies that we laugh at now that picture the future with people using these

gigantic building sized computers. They were actually right, because what they're imagining is we reached the end of Moore's law, but pages law continued, and in order to keep up with the bloated software of the future, you had to make computers bigger and bigger and bigger, and there we go. So that's the thing, is that that in the short term we might see this kind of technology work its

way into brand new form factors. I saw one that said, just imagine that you've turned your shirt into a cell phone. I thought, I don't want to imagine that, But okay, I guess that would be possible using this particular modality. Um So, assuming that that future does happen, even then we'll get to a point where we can't go any further. We'll just be we'll hit that that hard wall of physics where we cannot you know, you cannot break the laws of physics, as as Scotty has said repeatedly, at

least in my head. So yeah, it's possible that we'll see either a huge jump beyond what Moore's law would predict, assuming that photonics ends up working out and we can build practical systems based upon that we can see an enormous leap ahead. We could have this time where we have the parallel development of electronic and photonic until we get to a point where we have to make the switch, or it may just be that it doesn't work out and we'll have to figure out something else. Well, what

else is there? Well, one approach could be to look into designing three dimensional microprocessors. So if you look at a microchip right now, you're essentially looking at a two dimensional landscape. It's effectively two dimensional, though you're talking about the quantum size, Like the quantum level is so in in play that you can treat it as a two dimensional system. It's two dimensional in the way that old

school printing is two dimensional printing. I mean, you're still a piece of paper is three dimensional, but sure that a piece of paper also is enormously thick compared to a nanometer. So you're talking about you're talking about something that is so thin it is hard to imagine. Don't activate my my pedantic powers, Jonathan. Look, if you had it still has a depth dimension, if you had a line of atoms across, that would be one dimensional. That's

how we're talking like super super super small stuff. So anyway, you essentially have a two dimensional playing field to work with. You know, you have the the the surface area of the micro chip, which you don't want to make larger because that would mean that you would have to start making devices larger, right like your phone would have to get bigger in size, Not like that hasn't happened already, but it would have to get bigger in size in

order to fit more components on. Once we reach that fundamental, you cannot make components any smaller than this because it doesn't help the efficiency. So if you did three dimensional where you were able to stack these components in multiple ways so that it's not just a two dimensional space to play in, you could really increase the amount of UH of options you have and make Moore's law continue at least as long as you are able to still

create a good architecture that works in three dimensions. And there are there are companies that are making three dimensional transistors, three dimensional gates that work in this way. UM no telling how much of a stop gap that would be, Like how how many more years would this extend More's law?

Don't know, but it is It is really worth noting that engineers have found creative ways to keep Moore's law going well beyond what people expected, just based upon redesigning the architecture of the microprocessor itself, not necessarily saying let's get things even smaller and cram more of them on here. So yeah, I don't want this to be like Doom

and Gloom. That's far from it. The interesting thing here is that we've got this enormous engineering challenge and there's so many different people looking at ways to meet it. I think they'll figure it out. Yeah, well, they're smarter than we are, so I have faith. Anyway, that wraps

up our discussion about optical computers and photonics. If you guys have any questions, or perhaps you have suggestions for future episodes, we received one today in fact that we're looking at uh, you should send us a message let us know why you would like to hear. Tell us on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus. So handled all three is f W thinking and we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to

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