Today I have to present on ternary (or trinary) computing as opposed to binary computing. Part of the interesting applications have to do with the fact that optical computers (which use photons rather than electrons) could implement ternary systems to make vastly faster computers, because we've almost maxed out what we can make the electron do. We need to branch differently.
Anyway, one of the advantages to optical computers are that the photons would move faster than electrons can in circuits (electrons go much slower than the speed of light when moving through copper, for example). Also, photons have higher bandwidth. I puzzled over that for quite a while.
At first I (for some reason) decided that it must be because photons have more mass. But they're massless (duh). Then I looked into what particle bandwidth is (thanks, wikipedia!) and it basically depends on the spectral linewidth of a particle (in this situation). Since electrons have small linewidths because they move into discrete states and photons have a huge spectrum they can move around in, their bandwidth is greater. See, I was thinking about bandwidth in terms of internet speed and that was my hangup.
Silly me.
Anyway, watch this video, it's GREAT:
1 comment:
lolololololol love that video
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