Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M5150

Butterworth's Law

Butterworth's Law
TechnicalmediumPhysics
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Updated 2026-08-18

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

An empirical trend stating that the capacity carried by optical fiber doubles about every nine months, a faster cadence than Moore's Law at eighteen months or Cooper's Law at thirty. The name also connects to the Butterworth filter, whose defining property is a maximally flat response in the passband. Read together, the two senses point to the same design idea: smooth, even performance across the band with no ripples or sharp peaks, and a transport layer whose growth outpaces the processors at either end.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Placement decision: check whether transport is growing faster than compute before moving workloads to the cloud. - Flatness priority: choose a smooth response across the whole range over a sharp peak in one region. - Tradeoff framing: accept that maximizing flatness and maximizing speed pull against each other.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

When the channel improves faster than the endpoints, moving work across the network becomes cheaper over time while local capacity improves more slowly. This is why cloud gaming and remote model inference become viable: the transport bottleneck shrinks relative to the computation it carries. In filter terms the same logic appears as the maximally flat response, where even behavior across the passband is achieved by giving up the sharpest possible transition.

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