Headline, December10, 2013

''' HONOURING GLASS : 

MAGIC - CHEMISTRY - MIRACLE '''

Standard Optical Fiber, used in the lines that carry telephone conversations, and email, is made of some of the purest material not just on Earth, but in the universe.

Consider ordinary window glass. If you stack up three feet of window panes, only a hazy aqua light seeps through. In contrast, the glass used for optical fiber is sooo clear..............

That if the world's oceans were replaced with optical fiber glass, the bottom of even the deepest seas would be clearly visible to the people at the surface.

Optical fiber glass, says Corning senior research scientist Dana Bookbinder, ''is clearer than the air you are looking through.''

Although fiber-optic cables are made of impossibly clear glass, the glass is not so completely transparent that light will travel through it ''indefinitely''  without dimming and fuzzing.

Light flashed into the best optical fibers fades after about 80 miles and needs to be refreshed    -brightened, sharpened, cleaned up, and zapped on its way again. Quite simply, the signals need to amplified.

Amplification is a necessary evil, and it used to be done by converting the light back to electronic signals,  amplifying those, and converting the restored signals back to light to continue their journey.

Involved as it all sounds, amplification happens so quickly that conversations proceed without any  hiccups. These days, the job of amplification is much more efficiently and cheaply using lasers and special  ''amplifier fibers''.

Certain kinds of light, when pumped into certain kinds of glass fiber, actually amplify the signals in the fiber. Light, then, can be used to amplify and focus other light.

Amplifier fiber is used in tiny quantities compared to the ''million of miles'' fiber-optic cable laid across the country. Tiny loops  of amplifier, like very fine fishing fiber, do the job. But amplifiers are vital, and they are a lucrative business.

And what kind of glass does an amazing job of refreshing fiber-optic signals? : New antimony-silicate fiber: ''It blows everything else away in terms of performance. The bandwidth it will amplify exceeds anything known. It's the best material we've found.'' says Ellison of Corning.  

Strange and super are mystery the miracles of Glass. A single piece of optical fiber    -pulled glass-   is about the size of a strand of hair. Information flows through the piece of glass thread in a simple way   -as digital Morse code : flashes of light and no light.

The light is sent into the fiber with a tiny laser , whose important parts each the size of a grain of rice. The laser pulses away, sending coded information into the fiber.

So far, this is not really any more difficult to envision that the old signal-corps sailors, standing on the deck of a Navy ship, flashing away in Morse Code with a big light to another ship on the horizon. But here's where it gets truly amazing:

One laser, flashing light into a fiber, can send..........130,000...............

simultaneous phone conversations down the fiber.

That single channel carries the amount of information     -not just the words of all those conversations, but also the tone, the volume, and the emotion, not to mention the phone number.....................by flashing ON and  OFF  10 Billion Times a second.

Through a marvelously ingenious effort at packaging, single strand of fiber now routinely carry not just    One Channel Of Light,   but 40 and more channels.  That is, one thin strand of Optical Fiber can receive and transmit light from 40 lasers at the same time.

Each of those lasers emit a slightly different color light, so that the fiber can carry them without confusing them. A single strand of fiber can carry more than    5 million simultaneous   phone conversations    or your emails, Webpages, or Corporate-data streams.

When a fiber is carrying  40 channels of light,  it is sending 400 billion distinct flashes of light.........on! off on! off     - a second. How many is 400 billion pulses?

To live for    -400 Billion seconds-   you'd have to live to be................12,684   years old.

!!! Four hundred billion flashes a second, through a single thread!!!

So, all Students studying Sciences in the developing world, please, make sure your Professors show you a Fiber Optic Cable.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the developing world. See Ya all on !WOW! the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Another Obvious But Often Overlooked Truth : Students '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless