Can we use something other than electricity to power our electronics and computer chips? (Details inside )
Is their anything smaller than an electron that can be used to power and run our electronics. Like sub-atomic particles. Like for example a gravity powered computer? Or a neutrino powered power grid? The device would not be named electronics we would need a new name. What would you name the new tech?
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
18 Answers
Electrons have to move for “Electronics” to work.
Quarks and neutrinos don’t move electrons for computer chips.
@Tropical_Willie I’m thinking of something new. Not using electronics for our power grid. Something smaller than an electron for electronics. Something that is discovered at the CERN super colider? Maybe when the first tachions are discovered. (Faster than light sub atomic particles used as transistors ? )
Ok… Since we’re brainstorming here, I’ll bite.
How about photons? In the future some as yet unidentified field will enable steering and switching of photons as they move. The circuits will be incredibly fast since photons move at the speed of light and are massless.
Let’s call these circuits “photronics”, since “photonics” is already taken.
There are circuits now that are capable of measuring single photons.
Much of the sci-fi gaming I’ve done has optical circuits that still require electrical power for the lights, but use photons instead of electrons as the most likely successor to to electronics as we know them.
A little further out in the future, we’re probably talking about qubits becoming financially feasible to become mainstream as opposed to being strictly in the “big iron” market. There have also been speculations about organic processors and/or data storage mediums, and they are more electrochemical than than simply electronic.
I’ve been thinking a little more about this.
Photons have momentum that is proportional to their usually very frequencies, 500THz. range. It is possible the Photronics will use two or more beams of photons with nearly the same frequecies to produce a beat frequency that might be useful for moving nanoparticles and micromachined components.
As long as we don’t violate the laws of physics anything is possible.
Both photons and DNA are being worked on as the basis for faster computing right now. There is at least one working prototype of a photon-based fibre optic computer of which I’m aware, but it’s extremely large and hasn’t made it to production because it’s prohibitively expensive. The last I heard, DNA-based computing (which uses strings of DNA to do massively parallel computations) was at the basic-circuits level, though I saw predictions of DNA-based hard drives the size of a penny within a decade or so.
Electronics by nature is powered by electricity which is related to electron charge, movement and concentration. That is all electronics will ever have to work with. If we find something else it will no longer be “electronics” Computational science does not care so much what the medium is though so eventually we’ll probably be using light, quantum computing etc. We are already doing it to a certain degree.
@ARE_you_kidding_me Actually, some of the quantum computing I’ve seen could be accomplished with components made on the same machines that currently make solid-state electronics. While it uses slightly different materials and considerably different circuit design, the fundamental principles are pretty much the same; electrons going through doped semi-conductors.
Who says that the mechanism to power the chip and the mechanism it uses for control/logic have to be the same anyways? Put another way, gas doesn’t move cars, it pushes pistons as it burns, which turns a crankshaft, and that moves the car at a speed governed (in most cases) by the angle/position of a metal plate in the throttle body/carburetor. You have all these things that are neither gasoline nor linear motion in between, and I think that the next “big thing” will be something compatible with current electronics despite being totally different between the input and output.
@jerv electronics as we know them will never work on anything but electrons. That is not to say that we’ll come up with something different in the future. That was the point I was making. We already interface photons and electrons using fiber optics. That will continue and we will be forced at some point to call them optical circuits
@ARE_you_kidding_me I’m imagining using the photons to do the work – not just the switching like we do today. Every photon has momentum. I am thinking of nanostructures one or two atoms thick that are moved by the momentum of photon flow. The structure can be piezoelectric. The small flexible beams would move when the photons hit it.
Just to have an idea of the photon momentum effect, it takes about 10MW of red light to lift one gram . Now imagine infinitesimally small structures on the order of pico or femto or atto grams. The math and physics works. We just can’t do it. We can’t do it today but who’s to say in the future they won’t figure it out.
@jerv Yes. Avogadro came up with a pretty darn big number. The exponent is 23! There might be a tiny structure made of some future ceramic-metal blend with a mass of a microgram and it would still have the potential to contain a quadrillion switches.
We have no idea what the technology will be 100 years from now. In 1915 they couldn’t even imagine something as simple and cheap as the 16 GB SD card in our phones and cameras today. It fits in our pocket and costs $8 at Wally World. Unimaginable.
Once we can mass produce machines on the nanoscale reliably and cheaply…it’s on. We are probably just a couple of decades out from this.
@LuckyGuy Read Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Nice piece of rod logic hardware there.
Answer this question 
This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.
Composing members:
0
