HISTORY OF FIBER OPTICS
We ended last week with Michelson—Morley’s 1887, experiment as explained by George Gilder, who said it plunged conventional scientific thinking about the speed of light into prolonged chaos. Although James Clerk Maxwell calculated light speed to be a constant nearly a half-century earlier it nevertheless was contrary to his conventional belief that it must be variable. And, Sir Isaac Newton questioned himself, “When everything else in the observable universe is reverent to the movement of its source, could light’s speed be the only exception?” For two decades, Albert Einstein pondered this perplexity. He dreamed of racing a wave of light: seen by an outside observer, it would move at its usual pace of 300 million meters per second, but seen by him, it would be at rest? However, the very idea of light at rest struck Albert as an impossible paradox because Maxwell had defined light by its frequency, which multiplied by its wavelength always equaled the mystical 300 million meters per second. How could a frequency which is pure motion, be at rest?
As Einstein pondered the problem, he gradually realized that if Maxwell’s view about light speed being a constant was upheld then Newton’s classical mechanics, based on a fixed time—space grid, would have to give way. Einstein concluded that if the speed of light is an absolute constant then space and time must be variables!
This insight launched the most fundamental revolution in the history of science. Einstein took the very gauges and paradigms (para-dimes; standards), by which physicists had always grasped the world, and substituted elastic, curved, ever-changing parameters to them. Later, in his theory of “general relativity,” light itself would bend to an increasingly elastic grid. Time and space distended into a curvaceous, four-dimensional synthesis. Of course none of that was apparent, any more than the earth’s curvature is evident on your front lawn. Millennia passed before mankind discovered the spherical shape of our globe.
More centuries passed before Einstein conceived the elastic—curved universe. It is only grasping the enormity of the cosmos, in which the earth is a marvelous but infinitesimal spec that light-years and gravitational bends start to mean anything significant. Similarly, technologists did not have to face the reality of light speed’s “fixed” limit until Einstein racing a light wave, their megahertz and terahertz fiber-optic networks began to crash into the light’s speed—limit wall.
For most of the past decade, the speed of light was an incidental factor because most electronic devices operated too slowly for light’s speed inside them to constitute a limiting factor. But, as engineers wring out every inefficiency and elasticity, their blissful ignorance has changed. Reduced-instruction-set computing has multiplied the number of instructions performed per second into billions and the time per instruction into nanoseconds. Here the speed of light becomes consequential even across a tiny microchip.
In fiber optics, gone are most of the time hungry electronic line amplifiers and converters, replaced by all-optical amplifiers whose only real restraint is light’s own speed limit. In thousands of satellites in geosynchronous orbits 23.600 miles above the earth, engineers have pared the protocols of voice traffic until the switching delays dwindled to a few hundred milliseconds. All these advances in photonic technology had the effect of eliminating delay (or latency) from modern information systems.
Finally, engineers have reached the end of the line because they have exhausted all their “known” tricks of their trade. They now starkly confront, like Einstein did in the early 1900s, the residual barrier of light’s absolute speed—limit. Like the physicists before them, they’ve collided with it. And everything shatters—computer architecture, network topologies, satellite systems, software conventions—the entire time—space grid of the information economy. To be continued…
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