The coolest substance ever?
- Thread starter Celery
- Start date
jarlmaster
In Runtime
- Messages
- 473
- Location
- USA
Graphene is the future man. We need to spend crazy amounts of money on the development of this technology. I always say we need way more money spent on research and education.
As cool as graphene sounds, I'm always sceptical of articles that contain things like this:
Complete crap. This is clearly just pseudo-copied from somewhere else without any understanding on the author's side.
Pulling it apart:
Bear in mind some very clever folk have actually created a full wireless link (not just the antenna, which arguably isn't even the hardest bottleneck in creating a link at that speed) - that ran at 2.5Tb/s a couple of years ago now at a 1m distance, (Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second | ExtremeTech) - so 1Tb/s isn't exactly the top end of research tech any more either.
It's akin to saying "look, someone's just drawn up plans for a water pump that can pump a million times faster than my fuel pump does, this means I could use it as a fuel pump and my car would go a million times faster!"
I'm all for research into promising areas, of which graphene is one, but it annoys me when so many so called tech journalists with no grasp of the actual technology just plaster random crap on the internet (that they probably got from reading more crap on the internet posted by people like them.) It's worse in some places than others, but you see it all the time - it's like a bad game of Chinese whispers, and it bugs me like nothing else!
Complete crap. This is clearly just pseudo-copied from somewhere else without any understanding on the author's side.
Pulling it apart:
Rubbish. They've drawn up blueprints, not created it, and the terabit is a theoretical limit from about a metre away (source: Georgia Tech Researchers Show That Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads | MIT Technology Review) - they're a long way off from being able to actually make something like this.
Bear in mind some very clever folk have actually created a full wireless link (not just the antenna, which arguably isn't even the hardest bottleneck in creating a link at that speed) - that ran at 2.5Tb/s a couple of years ago now at a 1m distance, (Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second | ExtremeTech) - so 1Tb/s isn't exactly the top end of research tech any more either.
Comparison's sake? Rubbish. Sure, let's compare the theoretical maximum speed of a theoretical antenna to an average home broadband connection that's, err, usually delivered to the house via a cable? It's completely unrelated.
It's akin to saying "look, someone's just drawn up plans for a water pump that can pump a million times faster than my fuel pump does, this means I could use it as a fuel pump and my car would go a million times faster!"
What the heck is wireless graphene?! Makes no sense.
I'm all for research into promising areas, of which graphene is one, but it annoys me when so many so called tech journalists with no grasp of the actual technology just plaster random crap on the internet (that they probably got from reading more crap on the internet posted by people like them.) It's worse in some places than others, but you see it all the time - it's like a bad game of Chinese whispers, and it bugs me like nothing else!
What do you expect? The article was published in GQ, not the most tech oriented magazine.
I didn't want to extend my rant further, but I think that bit is completely made up - I don't see how it would work, and can't find any reference to it on a site that isn't Yahoo...
Oh, I unfortunately expect nothing less - but it still bugs me no end
Oh, it's a very interesting substance, and certainly warrants further research - I just get fed up of misinformation surrounding it. I'd say the claims in that article are mainly completely bogus rather than stretching the truth.
Anyway, a lot of research has gone into it already - around 4-5 years ago I remember seeing another stream of similar articles, they pop up from time to time. However, the hard part is manufacturing it in large quantities, which is the main problem with it that's been around for years now. If they could solve that one, we'd be all go with a vast array of new technologies - unfortunately, it's proving so hard I think it's going to be a long time before we see it become commercially viable, sad as that is! I really *want* to be proved wrong on that front however.
Back in the 70s & 80s the future of storage was said to be bubble memory. IBM and other companies were working on it and the only hold back was finding a way to manufacture it so that it could be commercially viable. The issue of manufacturing it inexpensively has never been solved which is why you rarely hear mention of bubble memory today.
Graphene may face the same future.
Graphene may face the same future.
