The Future Belongs To The Photon

Enua ,19.7 THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE PHOTON Electronics has been the main engine of innovation since the invention of the transistor 40 years ago. Most of tomorrow"s interesting technologies will work by manipulating light, not electricity. The electronics revolution is young. The electron was ident- ified less than a century ago and the microchip, on which today"s information-technology industry utterly depends, has been around for fewer than 20 years. The successes crammed into these two hectic decades have created the impression that electronics is a technology capable of limitless improve- ment. It is not. Electronics will give way to a superior technology based not on electricity but on light. Physicists did not realize until early in this century that light came in the separate packets they now call photons. But science has made startling progress in manipulation photons. A photonics revolution is already in the making. The first shot of the electronics revolution was the tr...