Wavelengths

A wavelength is the distance from a part of a wave to the same part in the next cycle.  It can be from one positive peak to the next, or one high pressure peak to the next, or the top of one water wave to the next, etc.  The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength.  Also, the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, the greater the energy.

I’m noticing something interesting on this planet, the trend seems to be to higher frequencies, shorter wavelengths, more energy.  Radios back in the 40’s used large vacuum tubes for amplifiers, they were big hunky things, and they tended to operate on rather low frequencies.  Today we use transistors and we can pack billions of them in a very small space of a few centimeters.

We used to use frequencies in the AM broadcast band for transmitting sounds, around 1 Mhz, or 1 million cycles per second, with a long wavelength of around 300 meters.  Now we’ve got Satellite radio broadcasting on 2.3 Ghz, that’s 2.3 billion cycles per second, a wavelength of .13 meters (typical receiving antenna will be 1/4 or 1/2 wavelength).

The thing that seems weird to me is that it’s not just technical things that are changing, it’s the pace of our lives, faster and faster, time intervals for things, shorter and shorter, we used to spend hours or even sometimes days reading a book, now we spend 15 seconds reading a blog, we used to live in good sized homes, now more and more the trend is towards tiny apartments and condos.

The logical conclusion to all of this is that eventually we’ll exist in no space at all for no time at all.  I don’t think I like where this is headed.