From computers and machinery to memories and nerve firings in humans and other animals, both use the flow of electricity to send, receive and read information/data. Why is that and what is it about electricity that does it? Like why not something else like sound or heat or radiation or something?
In: Biology
You use sound to send and receive information every day. You are using radiation to receive this very message. Biologically, the most important forms of information storage and processing are chemical in nature. The information stored on a hard drive is magnetic. Receipt printers and fax machines often use thermal printers to record information. CDs, DVDs, and vinyl records store information physically. Film cameras store information with light sensitive chemistry.
Electricity is a convenient way to send information, but it doesn’t have a special relationship with information.
Data or control signals could be in some other form, but electricity is useful for a number of reasons. First, it travels at basically the speed of light. Sound travels a great deal slower. (It is difficult to even compare the two, but imagine a race between a snail and a fighter jet.) Heat is even slower.
“Radiation” is a very broad category, but there are two basic types. One is the kind with alpha/beta/gamma particles, and is given off by radioactive elements, like Plutonium or Uranium. The other is **electro**magnetic radiation. This kind includes light, radio waves (including WiFi and cellular signals), and television signals that go up to satellites and back down to provide satellite television (and television feeds to cable television as well). Either of these could be used instead of electricity (and are in the case of wireless transmissions of data) but could not be used by the human body or animals, since they would require a source of radioactive isotopes or incredibly complex biological equipment to generate the radiation.
Compared to all that, electricity is a good compromise that is extremely fast, can be conducted through the body and through the world in “both” directions, and can be generated by chemical reactions without the need for other complex physical equipment. (A neat experiment, since this is ELI5, is to make a potato or lemon battery. All it needs is the potato/lemon and two different kinds of metal.)
On a side note, as mentioned we do use electricity and electromagnetic radiation, in the form of radio waves, to transmit data. We also use light, in the form of fiber optic cables. Here is something interesting about the history of it though. We started out a long time ago, using lights to communicate long distances. Lighthouses would warn ships about rocky coasts, and people could light a light or start a fire to indicate something. (If you are American, you may know the story of Paul Revere, who instructed an ally to use lanterns to indicate the method the British were approaching Boston.) Then, we used with wires (usually copper) to carry signals, first with Morse code, and later with actual voices via telephone. That worked for a long time, but was difficult to use for extremely long distances. Directional radio signals were a good way to get signals across difficult terrain, and once communication satellites were put in orbit, those could be used as well. Then, at the dawn of the internet, we went all the way back to using light to communicate with fiber optics! (Fiber optics can carry more data than traditional copper wires or radio communications, are less susceptible to interference, and the cables are less heavy, since the core is a type of glass instead of copper.)
Technically, you could use other mediums, but they are harder, more expensive, and less precise. I saw a video once where they built a simple counter using water instead of electricity. It was 1000x larger than the electric version, and it got everything all wet, but it still did the job.
At the end of the day, it really just comes down to being able to move things from a to b, in order to process the data, and electrons are the most effective thing we can move.
In the computer world, it isn’t. It’s stored in the form of magnetic polarity. Electricity is just the method of altering or carrying that magnetic polarity, because electricity also has a magnetic component to it.
Information is not stored as electricity. Everything in the universe is an expression of energy, so everything has an electromagnetic function, but this in itself isn’t information, it’s an expression of the information, like a letter or hieroglyph expresses language, but all the symbols of the world are not words, just expressions. Words, thoughts and meaning come from somewhere unknown and unexplainable to science – consciousness
For the record, the “electricity” used by nerves is not really the same as the electricity used by wires. In cells its the movement of positively charged ions, rather than the flow of negatively charged electrons in computers.
The reason most of our information processing works using electromagnetism is because when you get down to it, we don’t really have many choices. There are only four fundamental forces in the universe, one of them being electromagnetism, and the other three being the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. The strong and weak nuclear forces act inside the nucleus of atoms. That’s pretty hard for things on the molecular scale (like life) to manipulate. Gravity works on a way too large scale to be useful for information processing by life, although humans could theoretically create gravity-based information processors (Steve Mould has a video of a basic calculator that runs on the flow of water).
The only bit of the universe left then is electromagnetism, so every practical information processing procedure is going to end up based on some property of electromagnetism, because electromagnetism is the fundamental force that’s most interactive on the molecular level (the level of life and circuits).
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