Hello Regis, those were interesting observations. Especially when you say:
"Kinda everything old is new again as the near forgotten AM is proposed as the facilitator of our new 'age of enlightenment'"
It gets more uncanny than that. If AM is a seemingly simplistic solution offered up by SR, then it is only one door away from that of DWDM, which itself is a reincarnation of what cable television has been using for forty years: Frequency Division Multiplexing, or FDM.
FDM actually didn't start with cable, as you probably already know. FDM goes back to the turn of the century when open wire telephony used discreet high frequency carriers which were superimposed on a fundamental lower order carrier signal to carry four different conversations simultaneously onto the same, unprotected, uninsulated overhead copper wire pair - supported by poles.
"...everything old is new again as the near forgotten.."
Indeed, if my anticipations are correct,then that is the case. The mere fact that photonic spin is at play doesn't obviate the possibility that there is already a simple analogue in place that can be used to explain the theory of SR's operation. Without the smoke, of course, it's reduced to what I feel on some level can be explained in simpler terms, such as amplitude modulation or AM.
If one wanted to make it more difficult to understand, then even cable television's coaxial (and now hybrid fiber/coax) transmission dynamics can be reduced to terms that only a theoretical scientist can understand. But that doesn't stop cable from working properly. [Most of the time.]
So, let's take a few steps back and re-evaluate this situation. Suppose that the SR explanation is not readily available because it has never been characterized in quite the same venue (i.e., a fiber optic medium) that it now finds itself. At the same time, suppose that they have stumbled (as AHhaha and I have now come to speculate on, and almost agree entirely) on something that is so obvious, and so blatantly simple in principle, that they now find themselves having to protect it through extraordinary means. What to do?
Rotational, mechanical mirrors are not uncommon to optics. SR uses them, DWDMs use them, and other forms of optical transducers use them. Their use is far simpler to understand at a higher level of discussion, than the theoretical explanations that underlie photonic behavior. Instead of saying that I am skeptical at this point, or even cynical... I'm simply very interested to see how this unfolds.
At the same time, if I am to give this matter the benefit of the doubt (as we often do in order to form some basic opinion about its eventual efficacy), then I must give it some breathing room, and I must also ask some fundamental questions that have to do with how it will fit into existing environments. Or better, how it will engender new ones.
To me, it's simply a matter of being able to sort fact from haze (fiction, sometimes, too), and determining if there is a place in the universe for this technology. That is, once it is proved to be both viable and stable in the venues where it would be used. I suspect that it will be, but I don't know that for sure.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
