Shakespeare wrote that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. This quote has intrigued me from when I was little: how does this Mr Shakespeare know something that we can’t understand? I volunteered to be an altar boy in order to find out. I never got any further than the candidacy, and with hindsight I am quite happy things turned out this way.
Now I finally think I am beginning to understand what this darned Shakespeare meant. There is light in heaven and earth!
Light allows you to look back in time. Galileo did this first with his telescope, and these days they can see some frequencies of light in Dwingeloo that originated near the Big Bang. Light contains information; how fascinating!
Light also allows one to communicate. Think of lighthouses, which are there to help, or of an oil lamp around the neck of a horse walking on the beach – used to mislead ships.
But that is old school. These days we can send light pulses over an optical network. If such a pulse takes a Femtosecond (1/1000 nanosecond), communication speeds can be achieved of Terabits (10^12) per second. Now that is communication for you, that is communicating with lightpaths!
Now that we are all able to do this the next step is quite logical. We are going to deal with our earthly businesses in the heavens: Cloud Computing and Cloud Services. This means that we need to have very few devices in our homes. We simply call or signal the cloud – or contact it in another way – after which we are offered a word processor or some other service on demand. In this way data storage facilities, heavy servers and other types of equipment are just ‘more things in heaven and earth’. It is unknown as well as irrelevant where the connecting servers are physically located.
Well done Shakespeare for dreaming all these things up!