If a person from 1922 visited your home in 2022, they’d find many familiar conveniences. That person could likely retrieve sausage from your fridge and fry it up on your stove. They could make toast in your toaster without any confusion. They could also take a shower, flush the toilet, and iron their clothes. They could possibly even drive your car. But if that person wanted to make a phone call (perhaps to their descendants), they’d be hard pressed to know how. Our smartphones, which we persist in calling “phones” despite calls being one of their lesser-used functions, have almost nothing in common with the rotary-dial telephones that would have been familiar to our time-traveling friend.
From the other end of the timeline, if you asked a 1922 visionary in telecommunications what would be the future of the telephone, they might have envisioned push-button phones. They might have even imagined cordless phones. But buttonless, operator-less, touchscreen, cordless video phones that let you play music, watch movies, and buy groceries to be delivered to your door? No one could have seen that coming.
While pushbutton phones replaced rotary phones, and cell phones have almost completely replaced landlines, not all technologies replace the ones that came before. Take the bicycle, for example: although the vélo replaced horses as a mode of transportation between villages and burbs in the early 20th century, automotives have not replaced bicycles: cyclists and drivers now share the road on the morning commute.
For this issue of Photonics Focus, our editorial team gazed into our photonic crystal cavity. We asked, “What is the future of photonics?” The stories within this issue are the outcome of our visioning. And, while these technologies are all transformative, they’re all more like the bike than the phone: that is, these technologies are more likely to augment than replace.
A feature article by Jeff Hecht attempts to parse what is hype and what is a realistic expectation for quantum networks in the next 10 years. How will quantum networks be used, and who will really benefit? An article by Theresa Hitchens on optical communications for space explores the laser systems that future space missions will rely on to communicate with the mothership (Earth) to quickly transmit large amounts of data, including high-res images and video. And an article by Rebecca Pool looks to the holy grail of energy production—laser fusion—which is seeing a revival of interest from funders and startups.
So, it’s with a dose of skepticism and a dash of humility that we spend this issue of Photonics Focus looking into the future. History tells us that most attempts to see into the future get it laughably wrong. But it’s still fun to try.
Gwen Weerts, Photonics Focus Editor-in-chief
