Electromagnetics and Photonics Commons^™

The optics revolution at the turn of the 21st century transformed how we communicate. This book is aimed at a popular audience and describes the underlying principles of optical communication, how optical science impacts our daily lives and where it may go in the future. Topics include telecommunications, visual intelligence, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

Light is the quintessential messenger. It travels faster than anything. It weighs nothing, and

costs almost as little to make. A million rays of light carrying a thousand colors can travel along with each

other or through each other without interacting, carrying data and commands between millions of locations.

This is the parallelism of light, and it represents massive communication and computational power. With

it, machines of light can do a million things at once.