[colechristensen]

I mean, you can't get smaller than an atom, there is some amount of plausibility of using individual atoms as at least the occasional computing element.

Beyond that, engineering a quark-gluon plasma as a processor? I'd watch that Star Trek episode. (we might fantasize about stuff like that but we're roughly monkeys smashing rocks together in a cave vs. building an iPhone sort of gap away from that kind of thing unless somebody has a really good idea)

[mrandish]

> you can't get smaller than ...

I always thought the true limit was the Planck length against which an atom is giant. There's a whole zoo of sub-atomic particles but I don't think we know how (or if) we can apply those for practical computing.

[Gravityloss]

A physicist can fill in but there might be some stuff made out of subatomic particles for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter

[vitally3643]

You could, in principle, use photons and/or electrons. We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era, and photonic computing has been a popular research topic for a while.

You also have quantum computing, which I think can/does use subatomic particles? Not sure about that one

[dgfl]

It doesn’t, no. The most successful platform actually uses superconducting devices as large as millimeters, you can literally see them with the naked eye.

The issue with “just” photons and electrons is that you need something else to force them to behave like you want. And photons are large and non-interacting, really the opposite of what you want for computing. Great for communications of course.

[colechristensen]

photons and electrons are the water, not the pipes and valves

what matters is the size of the pumbing

[HarHarVeryFunny]

It depends on the type of quantum computer. In some a physical qubit is a single atom, but then to make it reliable they need to add error correction resulting in logical qubits consisting of at least 100 or so physical qubits.

Another type of quantum computer uses qubits consisting of "quantum circuits" which are actually huge macroscopic constructions (> 1mm).

[superjan]

You can’t make smaller chips features with photonics. Visible light photons have a wavelength between 400 and 800 nm, much larger than current chip features. When you go to higher frequencies they get smaller, but they are really difficult to produce and control.

[dataflow]

> You could, in principle, use photons and/or electrons. We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era, and photonic computing has been a popular research topic for a while

Wait, what? How does this work in principle for storage? You can store electrons but you're saying you can store photons too?

[mrguyorama]

We do use electrons. That's what flows through transistors to do computations. Or, vaguely, the distribution of the electric field....

>We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era

Uh, what?

There's only so many fundamental interactions in the Universe. Computing requires you to be able to distinguish two states and our current methodology is built around some sort of black box three input machine that can output either state, a switch.

That switch is the part that cannot be scaled down infinitely. The reality we are familiar with doesn't exist at atomic scales. "Things" don't even have properly defined boundaries at a certain level, and thermal noise is a huge issue.

IMO a much more direct limiter of our current computing capability is lack of manufacturing ability, and heat. We were lucky that transistors were so amenable to lithography as a concept, that they work so well in 2D and as a surface feature, as that is what drove our advances the past 100 years and enabled computing to be such a normal thing. The combination of a "Solid state" effect, the electric force having very convenient properties, and lithography being so amenable to scaling things in various directions is how we got here.

But lithography doesn't scale into 3D. We've been hacking around that by doing more layers but that scales awfully, has very strict limitations, and makes the heat problem infinitely worse, to the point of making it impossible to work around.

If we could assemble things atom by atom exactly how we want, we could vastly improve our theory and practice, and build really intricate processor chunks with effective cooling channels or something, and computing would scale so much more. Maybe. Maybe some other problem would suddenly start dominating in that world.

Biology literally is nanotechnology, but it takes massive tradeoffs in exchange. It might never be possible to manufacture, at scale, stuff atom by atom. The Universe doesn't promise us infinite progress in technology. Quite the opposite.