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Ok so I may be very much completely wrong about this, but as far as I understood from Veritasium's video, even though electrons themselves don't travel at that speed, information in the electrical field travels at light speed. So my question is, even though electrons in computer chips don't travel at light speed, informations does, right? If yes, why do we need stuff like photonic chips? My initial understanding was electrons travel slowly and since they carry the information, information too travels slowly. But Veritasium's video has now messed up my brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0

(I am not someone who has studied too much of physics. I just try to understand all of this for fun. So a little request would be to provide an answer that a person like me would understand. You can just divide your answer into an easy and complex part in case the actual answer is a complicated one. Please)

The Kalaakaar
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    The electric field in free space travels at the speed of light. The electric field in a wire travels slower. – Jon Custer Jan 06 '24 at 16:07
  • Your video doesn't mention photonic chips. What exactly do you mean by them? – Ruslan Jan 06 '24 at 16:08
  • @JonCuster speed of light is not the main problem of signal transfer by wire, especially when compared with optical fiber (and nobody would use vacuum for anything except interplanetary transmissions). But there are problems with electric data transfer, they are discussed in this thread. – Ruslan Jan 06 '24 at 16:12
  • @Ruslan - the fact remains that a signal (say a fast rise time pulse) travels more slowly down even very good cables. There are the additional issues on top. – Jon Custer Jan 06 '24 at 16:14
  • @Ruslan Basically instead of electrons, photons are used. It means no resistance nd also much lesser energy consumption. But anyways,I think Jon Custer's comment cleared my misunderstandings about fields. – The Kalaakaar Jan 06 '24 at 16:41
  • Note also that even in fibre optic cables, the photons are bouncing off the cable walls, which "reduces" the speed of light due to the increased length the photons travel (my rough calculations were by about 30%) – Kyle Kanos Jan 06 '24 at 17:08

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