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Am 18.02.2016 um 17:21 schrieb Anthony D. Baye:
> Stephen <mca### [at] aol com> wrote:
>> On 2/18/2016 12:18 AM, Anthony D. Baye wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> It would be immune to gamma rays and Electromagnetic interference, and if you
>>> used volumetric data storage, you would probably never run out of space.
>>>
>>
>> That is true. "640K ought to be enough for anybody." ;-)
>>
>
> I get the reference, and understand the concept. However, considering that the
> theoretical limit for volumetric data storage is something like one bit per
> cubic wavelength; given a laser with a wavelength of .15nm -assuming my math is
> correct- you could fit 2.962963e29 bits into a cubic meter.
>
> That's something like 3*10^16, or three Quintillion ( a little more, really ),
> terabytes. Per cubic meter of storage.
>
> Three Thousand Billion Terrabytes, plus a few million.
Careful: As storage space (in the literal sense) increases, area becomes
more and more of a limiting factor rather than volume, for two reasons:
(1) Obviously, nothing can get in or out of a volume of storage space
without passing through the surface.
(2) I concede I might be wrong here, but I'm deeply convinced that at a
fundamental level information transfer through a region of space is
impossible without /temporary storage/ of the information in said space;
in other words, information transfer puts a "load" on the storage medium
that reduces the effective capacity. And while the "load" for even a
single bit of information can be distributed across multiple pathways
(thanks to wave/particle duality), this distribution is across an area,
not a volume (this should be easy to see if you picture the information
transfer as a wavefront traveling through the medium).
This sharing of capacity between storage and transfer is demonstrably
true for conventional electronic memory, which needs data transfer
pathways between memory which reduce the space available for storage
cells, but as I said, I'm convinced it is true for /any/ type of data
storage.
Note that this matches the holographic principle postulated by modern
physics, which states that the maximum information capacity of any
spacetime region is fundamentally limited by its surface area rather
than its volume.
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