Digital wires

E lectrical wires transport energy and information and often both. For example, electrical power cords deliver electrical energy from wall outlets to computers, whereas Ethernet cable transports information in the form of electrical pulses from the internet modem to the computer and back. USB cables are used to both charge the battery of MP3 players and to load digital music on the player. Despite of the fact that electrical wires have long been used for communication as phone lines and for Cable TV, there are some reoccurring problems. Wires radiate electromagnetic fields which are picked up by other wires and disturb signals there. Such cross-talk between wires can be prevented by electric shields, but shielded wires are thick and expensive. A second problem is echoing. Signals traveling along a wire are often reflected at the end of the wire, and such echoes disturb other signals. Echoes can be suppressed with specially designed wire ending, but again, such endings are bulky and expensive. Corrosion of the connector is another common problem. Corroded electrical plugs can make electrical wires unreliable. Gold and platinum coatings prevent corrosion but such coatings are costly. Furthermore, all conventional wires have resistance and nonlinear dispersion curves, which means that pulses get smaller and broader as they travel along the wire. Repeater stations along the wire can help to maintain the pulse shape, but each repeater station requires a power source and repeater stations are a complex piece of electronics with a comparatively short life time. And finally, the speed at which signals are traveling along a regular wire depends on the speed of light of the wire material and thus the propagation speed is not easily adjustable. Sometimes, one needs to slow down the propagation of electrical pulses to synchronize them with other pulses. This can be achieved by sending the pulse through a long wire, a waiting loop, or with rather complicated electronics. Both methods are hard to implement on a microscopic scale. Electrical wires for power distribution are inefficient. On average, about 8% of the energy is lost in transmission. In addition, high-current power lines produce a significant amount of radiation and electro smog, which can crash computers and other electronics and may harm living beings [1]. A potential solution to this problem is superconducting wires. Superconducting power lines would have no Ohmic losses and would create much less radiation. However, refrigerating the power lines to a temperature where metals become superconducting is prohibitively expensive. By far, the most significant problem with power lines are cascading power failures. Regular power lines create a complex nonlinear network between power producers and power consumers, wherein large amounts of energy can flow in an erratic fashion with the speed of light. They can potentially focus their destructive power on a single infrastructure component and make it dysfunctional. This can make the energy flow even more violent and cause even larger damage, eventually the entire system collapses. Problems with cascading failures and extreme sensitivity to noise are not new to electronic devices. When the first analog computers where built, engineers ALFRED HÜBLER