🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <> nather@ut-sally.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
>In article <>, jqj@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (J Q Johnson) writes:
>> Going one step further out, why use matter to encode data at all?   If you 
>> want bulk sequential storage, simply modulate an EM wave directed at a
>> distant point ...  Result:  effectively infinite bulk storage at the cost
>> of a finite and small number of electrons. 
>
> ...any EM "wave" is made up of individual photons, which must appear in groups
>...  2 photons (1 == off, 2 == on, 100% detection efficiency) the storage will
> be far from infinite -- it will be, in fact, finite. (*gasp*).  
>
>Ed Nather

Why bother with using a presence/absence test at all?  What the original poster
was saying was, based on the fact that matter/energy (to the best of my know-
ledge) always exhibits the property of multiple energy levels, it is possible
to encode multiple bits for each energy level.  A useful analogy is to observe
the distinction between bits (1s and 0s) and baud (detectible state changes).
One baud may encode several bits.  Likewise, a photon may occupy a very large
number of energy levels; probably not an infinite number.  Digressing for a
moment into physics, we have E=h*nu (if you can draw a Greek nu on an alpha-
numeric terminal, more power to you); this shows that if we vary the energy
level of our photon beam, we vary its frequency.  Voila!  FM - and we already
know that this works...
   Since the universe is finite, any storage mechanism will be by definition
finite, but the constraint is not something simple like the total number of
electrons, but rather the total number of energy states occupied by all
mass/energy in the universe.  In fact, the universe already encodes *all*
information on itself in itself :->
                           \scott
-- 
Scott Hazen Mueller                         lll-crg.arpa!csustan!smdev
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