"Mark Fortune" wrote in message
...
Hmm, if light travels at a nice round figure of 300,000,000m/s, a 510nm
wavelength has a frequency of 300,000,000 / 0.00000051 =
588,235,294,117,647Hz = 588.24THz (is that right? ive only just woken up
so my maths is a little shakey). Now that's a pretty crazy frequency to
run any electronics project at if you ask me, and I suspect that unless
you were using some exotic superconducting material, you would have a
massive problem with inductance and capacitance in your good old copper
wires. might work on silicon though I dont know.

Well, that's kinda the point - in part, at least. But what I was
trying to get across to our "friend" Radium is that the higher
you go in frequency, the worse the model of "electricity is the
movement of electrons in conductors" looks, and the better the
model of "the metal bits are just there to guide the EM" looks -
and eventually you get to the point where you're basically
seeing everything as a waveguide. (Or another way to look
at it - the higher the frequency, the shorter the distance you
want to carry "electrical" signals in conductors, and the more
you rely on "pipes" to carry the signal long distances.) The
point of "you really need to be using a waveguide to carry this
any distance at all" happens at a frequency that's still considerably
below that form of EM that we call "visible light," but there is
really no difference in *kind* between light and a microwave RF
signal. Hence the earlier comment that if you somehow COULD
be making "electricity" with a wavelength of 510 nm, it WOULD
already result in "green light."

Bob M.