Remember reading an article a while back where they said they did it. Can’t find it but never really explained how it is even possible or how or why someone said look light lets put some data in itl
Remember reading an article a while back where they said they did it. Can’t find it but never really explained how it is even possible or how or why someone said look light lets put some data in itl
The simple way is like Morse code, variable gaps and lengths of emissions to convey information.
The more complex version is that plus variable intensity and variable wavelengths for a more complex “language”.
Ok I understood the morse code part but you lost me after that.
If you flip a sine wave upside down (shift it 180 degrees), it can mean “1.” If the wave stays as it is, it can mean “0.” This flipping happens really fast, creating a pattern of 1s and 0s. That’s your data.
A special receiver then measures the wave’s shifts and turns them back into the original 1s and 0s.
Instead of just flipping the wave or not, you can also shift it by smaller angles:
This way, each wave can carry two bits of data instead of one, making it faster.
I may be going out on a limb but something tells me we are far off from like transmitting a whole book and storing it in light or beam?
There’s no storage in light.
Think about when you talk. The sound comes out, shoots through the air, goes in someone’s ear, and then they interpret and remember what you said.
The light is your voice. It is transmitting data, but if there’s nobody around to hear it, the data is lost.
The light has to hit a receiver, which translates it into usable data and then saves it to a storage device.
mm I like this, you made it sound so simple!
Thanks! I’m a simple person who is interested in complex things, so I think I’ve gotten pretty good at these kinds of analogies.
Just consider Morse code, only it happens way, way faster than than you can perceive.
Think about the last time you saw LED tail lights on a car that seemed to leave after images when your eye moved.
That’s because those LEDs aren’t actually solidly lit but are flickering so fast that they seem to be just constantly on. Some older versions that flicker happened just slow enough that you can perceive it during rapid eye motions.
You can speed up that flicker fast enough that a very long Morse code message, book length even, could be transmitted in less than a second.
Add in “encoding” where a given short series of flickers stands not for a single letter but for a particular series, with a huge “alphabet” of these codes, and you start getting into the realm of rapid data transfer.
Old phone-style modems worked this way but with sound blips instead of light.
The entire internet backbone is fiber optic cables, so most data is already transferred using “beams” of light.
This is what computers do on either end of the fiber optic cables to transmit the data; except billions of times faster, using multiple “colors” (wavelengths) and similar tricks with light to stream as many 1’s & 0’s as fast as possible.