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
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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