Comments by "Alexander Sylchuk" (@sshko101) on "Silicon Photonics: The Next Silicon Revolution?" video.

Imagine a future where everyone is keen on getting a laser installed in their house and everything plugs into laser sockets on your walls... A world where you just order new optical logic circuits from the factory to get stacked onto each other to get "soldered" with fiber optics between layers to solve your specific task with just a laser you have. I remember those sleeples nights of imagining logical inversion on diodes or some mysterious new logic gates that might exist in photonics, ah those good old bicycle invention days.
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@shadowshadow2724 Not for my hypothetical ones. As were mentioned in this video modern approaches (as in photonics logics chips or tranceivers) mainly use either another semiconducter material for the laser inside the chip or a laser beam guided from another source, but we still rely on electro-magnetical excitation of some crystal in order to make a laser beam. Not really sure about actual signal fade in my theoretically endless scalability and real world quality of full internal reflection inside modern silicon photonics and how often would you need a repeater (more added energy) in such scenario. The obvious elephant in the room is the price (or energy and materials) wasted on manufacturng such devices relative to the lifetime energy consumption plus manufacturing expenditures of alternative electro-magnetic ones. On the other hand it's really hard to define the efficiency of modern electric chips since it's always relative to the electricity and price of equipment to the number of operations calculated during certain period of time. That period of time is usually defined not by the lifetime of a chip but rather by monetary benefit of upgrading your system into some newer generation technology. At the same time there should be always done this software/hardware weigh in in order to know whether your logic circuits are even worth making to be "set in stone" forever. The real benefit of such photonic approach would be almost indefinite lifespan of such a system (with only the risc of physical destruction and maybe some lychens). It should not fear solar wind or any rapid shift of magnetic field of our planet or even electro-magnetic waves from nuclear blasts or any nuclear blasts in ionosphere for that matter. Unlike crypto where you just burn coal for nothing you can "burn" some logic circuit forever whenever you have some free wind or sunshine... Em but for the lasers you would still need to transfer energy for them in some manner, preferably electric, if only there were some method to make a laser from concentrated sunlight. OK, I'm not an expert neither in lasers nor in photonics but at one point I had a plan (among many others) to get my masters degree in Germany in order to get somehow to the GlobalFoundries since they have a lot of IPs in photonics, but that never happened unfortunately.
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But what if refractive index is just a speed of vacuum moving along the light?
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@stevesteve8098 It´s all relative. The speed of light is still the same, it´s just the interference of electro-magnetic excitations of the medium through which the light travels causes it to emit out of phase light which superimposes itself onto original lightwave and generally makes it a shorter wavelength. Speed of light remains constant, only the phase velocity of that wave gets slower. But still, movement of a vacuum sounds like an interesting explanation. Have you ever heard about vacuum cleaners? The name itself suggests that the vacuum isn't that clean to begin with. Ad hoc explanations are always the best. I remember doing a phisics lab with my friend where we had to measure Plank's constant using total internal reflection. For some reason, either due to bad measurement or bad calculation, we got it almost correct, but only 10000 times greater than it should be. Our main theory on that was that at that exact moment the world has shrunk, divine intervention. So naturally, we adjusted the result. We were laughing so hard that we almost were banned from the lab and our professor was hesitant to give us even lowest marks for that since he decided that we are some morons who couldn't stop laughin and have absoulutely no idea on what we were doing.
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@stevesteve8098 Your explanation is still about "vacuum moving along the light" since our time frame makes it to appear as if the light enters a solid then teleports itself into some "higher dimension" where we (or our frame of reference) are traveling with significant enough speed relative to the light so that we get the light delayed from the time we were expecting it to arrive. There's a train without brakes going with it's maximum constant speed and it enters a tunnel. Everyone can measure the distance between the entrance and exit of the tunnel. Even more so, the tunnel is transparent on the observers side so everyone sees that it actually goes in the straight line. Everyone can see that from their point of view train slowes down in the tunnel. So in this analogy you are saying that it's simply the problem of our frame of reference, implying that it's just a nature of tunnels to delay trains. I'm just saying that the track is wavy if you look up close onto it. Inside the tunnel there is a set network of tracks through which many smaller trains constantly travelling. Those tracks arent actually rigid but bend accordingly to all of the traffic input. And our train doesn't always go just through it's own track, but it has to find a way through the endless array of junctions set inside that tunnel. The rail network inside the tunnel makes it so that our train has to go longer path despite the fact that the speed is constant, frequency of it going through it's wavy course is the same, but the wavelength of its course is now shorter and it is defined by the nature of the internal "track system" inside our tunnel. I just think that relativity explanation is too vague if we are just talking about frame of reference of observers. I think that the only important frames of references are just "our train", "trains inside the tunnel" and their "schedule" and all the "junctions" inside the tunnel (be it crystaline or molecular structure of our medium).
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