In 2013 the UN proclaimed that 2015 would be the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies, or IYL for short. By doing so, the UN has reinforced the necessity of light; it is vital to not only human life but to our earth in general. The opening ceremony was held in Paris from the 19th to 20th of January, just the first of a long series of events across the world. Light has played a developing role in 21st century science, revolutionizing our take on a vast array of issues ranging from energy issues to agricultural issues, from health issues to education issues. It is thus a link between economic, cultural, and political aspects of our ever-globalizing contemporary world. As the chairman of the IYL 2015 Steering Committee has stated, “An International Year of Light is a tremendous opportunity to ensure that international policymakers and stakeholders are made aware of the problem-solving potential of light technology. We now have a unique opportunity to raise global awareness of this.”
On the website www.2015.org there is a page on “why light matters”. On this page one can learn about photonics, which is the science of detecting, controlling and generating photons. According to the description of photonics, the 21st century will depend on photonics to the same extent that the 20th century depended on electronics. I did not realized how large of an effect photonic technology has on the world economy but apparently from 2005 to 2011 growth in the photonics industry more than doubled that of the worldwide gross domestic product. The current global market is 300 billion euros and is expected to rise to 600 billion euros by 2020.
The reason that this industry has been so successful is because photonics is used in producing products that are considered necessities in today’s modern world. From the site, I learned about fiber optics. The use of light in fiber optics has entirely transformed the way in which people interact and communicate; fiber optics are most commonly used in telecommunications. Optical fibers are fibers made from silica; they are flexible, transparent, and extremely thin. They are extremely useful in contrast to wire cables. Optical fibers are able to allow transmission at high bandwidths over long distances, are unaffected by electromagnetic interference, and provide less loss than metal wires when signals pass through them. In addition to communication, optical fibers are also used for remote sensing; this is often found in security systems. Optical fibers can be modified so that the property to measure modulates intensity, polarization, wavelength, phase, or transit time of light in the fibers- thus they can be used to measure qualities such as strain, pressure, and temperature. Thanks to Charles K. Kao who in the 1960s discovered fiber optics as a medium for telecommunication, modern communication and globalization has flourished.
I hear about fiber optics all the time, but I they’re so common place these days that I tend to forget to how important they are, and how much they’ve revolutionized communications. It really is amazing how far we’ve come over the last 50 years in terms of communications – all the way from morse code and radios to online blogs like these 🙂