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What I don't understand about light computing is how to you use photons to do work? EM radiation is great at carrying information, but it seems that you need el
by seanalltogether 11y ago
What I don't understand about light computing is how to you use photons to do work? EM radiation is great at carrying information, but it seems that you need electricity to actually do the work of physically pushing gates and transistors around. How do you actually replace the work load with light?
- dougmany 11y agoVery tiny solar sails.
- cloudsloth 11y agoYeah! Is that actually feasible?
- runeks 11y agowhat I'm thinking is that you don't really need the light to do work, as such. If you can build a microscopic, say, XOR gate based on light, which accepts two input light streams, and outputs a single stream that is the XOR of the inputs, you can start building a CPU using light. Perhaps there is some material that, when shined with the light from a single source, it emits light, but when shined with twice the light, it blocks the light. That would be an XOR gate, as far as I can see, and it would not be running on a clock -- the two input streams combine inside the gate to produce the output.
- gipp 11y agoWell, photons have plenty of energy and momentum ("plenty" at the atomic scale). Also I'm not sure if I'm interpreting your question wrong, but nothing actually physically moves in a CPU. "Gate" is just a metaphor.