Any future form of Physics behind future communication?

EfrainLagos

Today We use Electromagnetic Waves. What would be the future of form of communication?

mathman

I can't think of anything other than things going at the speed of light. I presume you are not thinking of sound waves.

Xitami

even the sound waves are transmitted through electromagnetic waves. atoms act on each other just because of them

robphy

Quantum mechanics...
http://www.nec-labs.com/~mroetteler/e6713.html
http://home.uchicago.edu/~ngemelke/slides_9.pdf

Grizzled

If you want to stay more or less within the realms of today's physics (no FTL, wormholes and the like), well, the obvious candidates that immediately spring to mind are neutrinos and gravitational waves. Much harder to block, distort or obscure. Neutrinos at least should also provide a lot of banwidth. Technical details of course would be... shall we say.. interesting.

Further afield, if you want something more "advanced", tachyons would be my favorite option.

-Job-

There is research in the use of Quantum effects in communication channels to ensure security of transmitted data (by guaranteeing that the channel has not been tampered with for example).

Computation in general has alot to gain from new discoveries in physics (Quantum computation being one such example).

Bobbywhy

Optical solitons, when discovered, enabled a revolution in data transmission in optical fibers. ELECTRICAL SOLITONS, which have been generated, promise to have a huge impact on our transmission of data from point to point. Google them.

cephron

Hear, hear; gravity waves were the first thing I thought of, too. I read a sci-fi in which a micro black-hole was vibrated inside of an electrostatic bottle to produce gravity waves; I wonder if that would make a feasible transmitter in real life?

sru2

The next step would probably be neutrinos. We can produce and detect them, so its a question of reducing this, which is an engineering issue.

rishi.sharma

currently as far as I know , its Laser based optical transmission. The fastest I read was ~26 Terabits/sec for single laser by a research lab.

Futuristic technologies can be based on Quantum mechanics.

btw although it sounds a bit hypothetical but, I am pretty sure that if the universe is so much big as it is believed to be , then light isn't the fastest. If universe is infinite then there lies infinite possibilities associated with it.

Grizzled

But your laser beam can be blocked by a planet or a dust cloud. It can also be bent by gravity. And it is very narrow (directional).

In contrast, gravitational waves for instance allow broadcast type of transmissions and both gravity and neutrinos are much better in negotating any obstacles and deflections.

dimensionless

I have to wonder about the strong force and the weak force.

Antiphon

Bingo.

Illuminerdi

I'm a bit skeptical of quantum computing, because it's so labile to environmental stimuli. I'm sure some people thought the same of MOSFETs before CMOS was developed, but it's hard to imagine a solution to extreme heat-dependent behavior as opposed to just adding a complementary transistor.


Though quantum encryption seems a bit more promising, but I less a background in physics than in electrical engineering, so perhaps I have to look into it more.

Grizzled

Both are limited to subatomic distances. Not much good for real life communication.

Theoretically, you may be able (maybe!) to use them for electronics if and when you start manipulating single atoms (we are not too far away from that by now). But even that is doubtful, even single atoms are way, way too large for those forces. Anything else...I don't see how, even by a stretch of imagination.

jtbell

Some of these ideas are getting waaay ahead of the current limits of technology, let alone fundamental science. We haven't even detected any sort of gravitational waves yet, let alone generated them.

This thread is therefore closed.

Any speculation here about technological developments needs to be grounded in current research and development activity. Saying "we can figure out how to do it someday" doesn't cut it.