> showing that fundamentally digital computing with optical photons will be immensely power hungry

> they really are completely unrealistic

Unrealistic only because they're power hungry? That sounds like a temporary problem, kind of like when we come up with a bunch of ML approaches we couldn't actually do in the 80s/90s because of the hardware resources required, but today work fine.

Maybe even if the solution aren't useful today, they could be useful in the future? Or maybe with these results, there are more people being inspired to create solutions specifically about the power usage?

"we don't need to resort to this sort of stuff" makes it sound like this is all so beneath you and not deserving of attention, but why are you then paying attention to it?

Miller limit is fundamentally due to photons being bosons, not great for digital logic (switches) vs carrying info.

There are promising avenues to use "bosonic" nonlinearity to overtake traditional fermionic computing, but they are basically not being explored by EE departments despite (because of?) their oversized funding and attention

> > showing that fundamentally digital computing with optical photons will be immensely power hungry > > > they really are completely unrealistic > > Unrealistic only because they're power hungry? That sounds like a temporary problem, kind of like when we come up with a bunch of ML approaches we couldn't actually do in the 80s/90s because of the hardware resources required, but today work fine. > > Maybe even if the solution aren't useful today, they could be useful in the future? Or maybe with these results, there are more people being inspired to create solutions specifically about the power usage? >

No they are fundamentally power hungry because you essentially need a nonlinear response, i.e. photons need to interact with each other. However photons are bosons and really dislike interacting with each other.

Same thing about the size of the circuits they are determined by the wavelength of light, so fundamentally they are much larger than electronic circuits.

> "we don't need to resort to this sort of stuff" makes it sound like this is all so beneath you and not deserving of attention, but why are you then paying attention to it?

That's not what I said, in fact they deserve my attention because they need to be called out, as the article clearly does not highlight the limitations.

Universities believe that constantly putting out pieces that sound like some research is revolutionary and will change everything increases public support of science. It doesn't, because the vast majority of science is incremental and mostly learning about some weird, niche thing that probably won't translate into applications. This causes the public to misunderstand the role of scientific research and lose faith in it when it doesn't deliver on its promises (made by the university press office, not the researcher).

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