ly5: The universe is made of two kinds of particles, Bosons and Fermions. Light is a boson. Most of the stuff we touch is made of Fermions. Electricity is fermions also.

Bosons, like light, don't like to interact with things. They just want to go places, as fast as they possibly can. So if you want a particle to carry information from point A to point B, light is great. Point it in the right direction and off it goes, and it won't interact with anything unless it absolutely as to.

Fermions, like electrons, love bumping into each other and changing each other. They like to make atoms and collide and bounce off each other all the time. So if you want to build a switch or a microchip where lots of things connect to each other to do some big complicated task like computing lots of math then electrons work really well.

But if you try to get photons to dance together to do something complicated you'll have a hard time. They only interact with each other and the stuff around them when things are just right, and then only in limited ways.

And if you try to use electrons to move data over any kind of distance that's hard too. They're constantly stopping to chat with atoms they find along the way, turning the energy of your message into heat.

How's that?

That is nice.

But then why do fiber optic cables work? The data does need to be turned into photons, and back from photons into electrons at some point. So all of that has switching and has been done for a long time.

Guess maybe lot of people like me are wondering why the technology for fiber optic cables can't be scaled down further to be used on chips.

Latency? Takes time to make photons from electrons and vice versa. Folks try to step around this with light-driven gates. Lots to learn! Plenty out there!

There are bosons that carry charges and/or mass like the weak bosons and the gluons. There is nothing in principle about bosons that would make them incapable of building logic gates out of them.

Some advanced civilization (future us) may use them. Even photons interact with each other a little bit due to QED.

For sure, you can if you want to. And if you pull it off there are some advantages, which the article describes.

It's just harder.

I wonder if it's just harder for us, now. It used to be hard for humans to make fire: nowadays you have match stick or lighter technology to make fire just like that. I wonder if we as humanity will be able to build the technological harness around light just as well.

There's also composite bosons like cooper pairs which are just made up of two electrons.

That's a fantastic explanation. +1.

In quantum mechanics, bosons are (often massless) force carrying particles like photons or gluons. Fermions are the massive matter particles, such as electrons or quarks.

So, while I’ve never heard this saying before, I assume it’s meaning is that massless particles like photons are best for carrying information around (rather than electrons we are using in circuits today), while the electrons are best for carrying state, like in a switch.

Note, that in networking we have already made that transition by using fiber optics, rather than electric wire to transfer information over longer distances.

And radio! We use lots of radio as well.

I wonder what the longest information carrying electric wire is? They used to cross oceans, but not anymore. There are loads of DSL twisted pairs and co-ax cables in the "last mile" that maybe go 5km max. In rural areas maybe up to 50km with repeaters?

Is there something in between? Some old buried copper trunk cable between two university campuses or something like that?

Depending on your definition of wire, probably the earth. The first telegraph systems used the earth (or sea water can't remember) as the return path.