Comment Re:Theoretical limits... (Score 1) 75
I may be misremembering, but I believe even this interaction occurs at the speed of light. The two particles (atoms, or electrons in the version of this thought experiment with which I am familiar) interact via virtual gauge bosons, which are force-carrying particles. And these particles travel at, you guessed it, the speed of light. If the particles interacted instantaneously, then I wonder if in fact they aren't really "separate" particles in the first place.
Everything we know about physics tells us it is IMPOSSIBLE for ANY sort of communication to proceed faster than the speed of light. Even gravity propagates at this fixed rate.
The idea is to build faster chips not by increasing the speed of signal transmission, but by decreasing the length of the signal path. Which is the entire point of this nanotech stuff anyway.
As for whether there is a theoretical maximum limit on computational speed, I really doubt that. You can always go twice as fast by using two circuits in parallel, provided the job can be parallelized. In that case, then the rate of computation is limited only by the amount of material and energy in the universe necessary to build the computation modules.
Everything we know about physics tells us it is IMPOSSIBLE for ANY sort of communication to proceed faster than the speed of light. Even gravity propagates at this fixed rate.
The idea is to build faster chips not by increasing the speed of signal transmission, but by decreasing the length of the signal path. Which is the entire point of this nanotech stuff anyway.
As for whether there is a theoretical maximum limit on computational speed, I really doubt that. You can always go twice as fast by using two circuits in parallel, provided the job can be parallelized. In that case, then the rate of computation is limited only by the amount of material and energy in the universe necessary to build the computation modules.
