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0 pointsajuc10y ago0 comments

Information we move around using electrons moves much faster than any single electron - because electrostatic field changes move at speed of light obviously, so the electrons at the end of wire start moving as soon as the electrostatic field change gets to it.

You don't have to wait with processing for the electron from the beggining of the wire to get to the end?

So, the difference between photons and electrons speed as measured by the time it takes electronic and optical signal to move through the same distance - is insignificant.

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dogma113810y ago· 2 in thread

I didn't say that we need to move electrons (although we do for some things like Flash Memory), but you are confusing simple wave propagation in conductors with electron mobility in semiconductors which is quite a bit more complicated.

You also need to remember that when we talking about waves then the wavelength ties directly to your data throughput, and with electrons the wavelength in conductors at say a frequency of 1GHZ is still around 3 kilometers, visible light has much much shorter wavelengths which allows you to pass more data per given amount of time.

ajucOP10y ago

Yeah I was thinking about conductors, didn't realized it's different in semiconductor.

Regarding the wavelength - it's another of these things I never quite understood about physics. I've been told that every particle can be thought of as a wave with a frequency, and that it corresponds to the energy of the particle. Photons have lower energies than electrons or protons, so the wavelength of electrons should be shorter, not longer?

dogma113810y ago

You've mixed and matched some of the stuff, leave wave-matter duality aside. You can treat it as any other wave in that regards best analogy will be acoustic waves because they are very simple. http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node102.ht...

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