🚨 THE AGE OF LIGHT: SCIENTISTS FIND THE MISSING MATERIAL FOR PHOTONIC COMPUTERS
Electricity had a good run. The future belongs to light.
Researchers at NYU’s Martiniani Lab just discovered a new material - they call it a “gyromorph” - that could finally make light-based computers a reality.
These aren’t your standard chips.
They don’t move electrons; they move photons - at near-infinite speed and with almost zero heat loss.
The problem? Controlling light is hard.
It wants to scatter, fade, and escape. Enter gyromorphs - structures that behave like both liquids and crystals, combining randomness with order in a way that blocks stray light from every angle.
The result: a perfect “optical firewall.”
Unlike the quasicrystals that won a Nobel Prize in 2011 but never quite delivered on this front, gyromorphs don’t just reflect light - they tame it.
Built through algorithmic design and born from “correlated disorder,” they might be the key to computers that run faster than Moore’s Law ever imagined.
This is the dawn of photonic computation - where chips glow instead of burn.
The next Silicon Valley won’t be built on silicon at all.
Source: NYU, Physical Review Letters
ELON: PHOTONS ARE ALL YOU NEED TO TRAIN THE AI
“The really wild thing about [Tesla’s] end-to-end training is that it learns to read, like it can read signs, but we never taught it to read.
We never taught it what a car was or what a person was or a cyclist.
It learned what all those things are, what all the objects are on the road from video, just from watching videos.
Just like humans.
I mean humans are photons in, controls out.
The vast majority of information reaching our brain is from our eyes.
The output is our motor signals to our fingers and mouth in order to communicate.
Photons in, controls out.”
Source: Interview with Lex Fridman, November 2023