franka (11/06/82)
I was rambling with a friend tonight and was wondering about the next big thing in computing. It seems to me that using low energy EM waves (i.e., electrons, photons, etc.) is a rather slow way of working with information. It seems to me that information in the universe is stored (manifested?) by disturbances in the underlying space-time continuum and so as not to violate Heisenburg's uncertainty principal, the higher the energy of the particle, the faster the interaction => disturbance => transfer of information. Seeing this, it is an interesting question to consider if it is possible to use higher energy particles (or collections thereof) as elements in an ultra-high speed computer. We all know that normal semiconductors use EM waves transfered by electrons held in a crystal lattice to transfer this information and that these particles are governed by the Fermi-Dirac equations (which make them very useful, albeit slow). What I was wondering is if we can somehow construct a lattice of bosons statistically governed by the Bose-Einstein equations (perhaps in a high energy plasma) to transfer information in the same way. The interactions of the bosons would be transmitted by strong and weak nuclear interactions and since these interactions are of much higher energies, the time involved in the transfer of information (and therefore the computation) would be much shorter. Does this idea work? Any comments? Probably just pissing into a black hole, Frank A. Adrian (decvax!teklabs!tekcad!franka)