The current turmoil in the computer industry is likely to be as nothing compared with the revolution that could be just over the horizon if optical computing comes of age, but new electromagnetic phenomena could also have a big part to play: the Wall Street Journal reports that NEC Corp’s new NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey is studying disordered or glassy – viscous liquid – states of megnetism in a magnetoplumbite crystal, in which Chromium atoms are arranged in Kagome lattices that can be represented as six-pointed stars in which magnetism is distributed in multiple symmetrical directions rather than the simple familiar north and south poles; the researchers conceive of using this property to create a completely new digital code with three or more numbers rather than the two – zero and one – of binary code, creating languages orders of magnitude more powerful than those in use today.
