Fumfer Physics 32: CPUs, GPUs, QPUs & the Smallest Unit
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/09
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner probe the future of compute: CPUs for serial work, GPUs for parallelism, and unstable quantum processors, tied together by Jacobsen’s “contextual compute,” which routes tasks to the right engine in real time. They ask about the smallest actionable unit of calculation; Rosner argues it is the electron, with photons a plausible successor. Moore’s Law lingers as an efficiency race, while quantum offers leaps. The pair then flip to physics: photons lose energy to redshift yet experience zero time, suggesting photons are events and information couriers. A playful “reverse Pokémon” tag ends a curious exchange.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Anyway, all right—so, computing. Think about how we process information. CPUs handle linear processing—you can increase their power, but it becomes inefficient. GPUs use parallel processing, and now we’re experimenting with 3D stacking, though that introduces heat management problems requiring massive cooling systems. On top of that, quantum processors—QPU systems—are still highly unstable. There’s even a guy who patented a design to combine all three—CPU, GPU, and QPU—on one chip. I talked to him about contextual compute, the idea of optimizing which processor handles which task in real time. So in that context, what’s the smallest unit that can actually perform a calculation? Like, in a CPU, GPU, or QPU, what’s the physical limit—the minimum distance or event before quantum fuzziness disrupts the computation?
Rick Rosner: Essentially, the sub-electron scale—where quantum uncertainty prevents a stable signal. You can scale things down and experiment with photons, but everyone’s still trying to keep Moore’s Law alive—making transistors smaller and reducing power consumption per operation. A “flip” or “flop” basically refers to the energy cost of changing a bit from zero to one.
In a conventional circuit, your smallest functional unit for changing a state—a flip—is an electron. You send an electron down a wire; it flips a gate. That’s the minimal requirement—you need enough physical space and energy to accommodate a single electron.
But you can theoretically go smaller by using photons instead of electrons. I’m not sure how far that technology has developed yet, or if we’ve even reached the point where we need to. Quantum computing already pushes several generations beyond Moore’s Law, since it allows massive parallel computation. Instead of running one set of calculations at a time, you can process an enormous number of quantum states simultaneously—but only in certain contexts where superposition and entanglement can be applied effectively.
There’s been speculation about computing with even smaller subatomic particles, but that’s likely either misremembered or speculative nonsense. For now, the smallest practical change agent in computation is probably still the electron, maybe with photons as a future alternative.
Jacobsen: That’s probably something to dig deeper into—maybe later, with a good literature search. Before that, photons themselves are interesting. They travel at the speed of light and lose energy due to the curvature of spacetime—cosmological redshift. But from the photon’s own perspective, if it had one, it doesn’t experience time at all. How do we reconcile that? From our viewpoint, photons age and lose energy; from theirs, no time passes.
Rosner: That’s a decent question. A photon emitted from one point and absorbed at another experiences no passage of time—it’s instantaneous from its “point of view.” So a photon traveling across a galaxy is, in a sense, in both places at once: the emission and the absorption occur simultaneously in its own frame.
From the photon’s frame—if such a frame meaningfully exists—it doesn’t experience duration. Its proper time is zero. That implies photons don’t exist as persistent entities the way particles with mass do; they are events, not enduring things.
So they’re fundamentally different—information propagators that don’t experience time themselves but allow the rest of the universe to experience change. Tacit carriers of information, bridging what we perceive as the flow of time.
The philosophical idea of photons probably has to wait for a better understanding of how information itself functions in the universe. For a while, I thought—maybe still think—that when you emit a photon, it’s like a strain in the electromagnetic field, a kind of localized stress that either triggers an event at every point along its trajectory or doesn’t. I’ve looked at photons as consistency checkers: if a photon can travel indefinitely without being absorbed, that suggests the information it carries is fully compatible with the structure of the universe it’s traversing.
So when a photon loses energy to redshift but keeps going, it’s essentially the universe agreeing, “Yes, this information fits.” But if the stress that produced the photon causes a capture event—if the photon gets absorbed—that might mean the information it carries isn’t consistent with the local state of the universe at that point. Maybe that’s nonsense, maybe it’s metaphysical speculation, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
So, in a sense, a photon that travels forever without being absorbed is the universe tacitly approving the information it represents. The absence of capture is a kind of ongoing confirmation—a tacit generation of information. Every photon that keeps moving without interaction for billions of years is, in effect, a “non-event” that still encodes affirmation of universal consistency.
Jacobsen: So the universe is basically Pokémon.
Rosner: Pokémon?
Jacobsen: Yeah—“gotta catch ’em all.”
Rosner: Actually, it’s reverse Pokémon: to win, you have to not catch them all.
Jacobsen: Pika-pi! Oh god.
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