HISTORY OF FIBER OPTICS
The week’s “History of Fiber Optics” is taken from George Gilder’s book “Telecosm published in the year 2000…” It is now practical to put a thousand wavelengths on a single fiber, ten billion bits of information per second on each wavelength, and as many as 864 fibers in each cable. This adds up to a total of 8.6 petabits per second in a single fiber sheath. Eight petabits per second is a thousand times the total average telecommunications traffic across the entire global infrastructure as recently as 1997. Eight petabits represented the total internet traffic in 1995, per month. Engulfed by this avalanche of bandwidth, we cannot readily measure it. But the leaders in the world economy are changing course to ride the tides of light. A global economy designed to conserve bandwidth—is breaking apart and reorganizing itself to waste bandwidth and conserve power, silicon area, and transistors. Financiers are radically repositioning capitol markets to take advantage of these changing values. With total internet traffic and bandwidth doubling every three or four months, markets have to learn how to evaluate internet companies now facing less than one tenth of one percent of the volume they can expect some five years hence . Reduced to irrelevance are all the conceptual foundations of the computer age. A new economy is emerging based on a new sphere of cornucopian radiance—reality unmasked, leaving only the promethean (creative) light.
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true”—James Clerk Maxwell.
“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”—Mae West. The discovery of electromagnetism, and its taming in a mathematical system, was the paramount achievement of the nineteenth century and the first step into the telecosm. The man who did it was the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In his honor, we should call the total electromagnetic spectrum, “Maxwell’s rainbow” and most world businesses today are one way or another, pursuing the pot of gold at the end of it. Arriving at the profound insight that all physical phenomena, from images and energies to chemical and solid bodies are oscillating, Maxwell embarked on a science of “shaking.” For roughly a hundred and fifty years, this improbable topic has animated all physics. Another word for oscillation is temperature. Without oscillations, the mostly empty matter of the universe would collapse in on itself. In theory, you can make the shaking stop, but only by making the temperature—273 degrees below zero Celsius, or zero Kelvin. So far unreachable even in laboratories, it is the temperature of the universe’s heat death. When things oscillate they make waves and this spectrum of waves has enabled telecommunications to connect our global world at the speed of light.
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