Summary

"Mind at Light Speed" is the ultimate story of artificial intelligence -- and how it will revolutionize the world in which we live. David Nolte, Professor of Physics at Purdue University, and his research colleagues have devoted their lives to building computers that use light instead of electricity for computation. These machines will be so fast and efficient that they will generate a new kind of intelligence, which for centuries has only been dreamed of by visionaries and mystics. That science fiction is now real.

Since the invention of the laser right up to the recent news that a light particle was halted as if it were a baseball caught in a mitt, we have watched the manipulation of light grow ever more sophisticated and ingenious. That line of research is about to pay off more dramatically than we could have hoped. Nolte's and his colleagues' simple yet revolutionary idea is that, while electric charge may have always done the calculating in our computers -- "and" inside our brains --we can build machines that compute with light, with photons, instead. Such optical computers would operate at light speed and in the process red