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Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data?
Geoffrey Kidd writes: "There's a very interesting article
at EE Times about some research which seems to indicate
that an essentially unlimited number of bits can be stored in ONE electron. Hmmm. What if one
could encode every .mp3 file on Napster in one electron? :)"
Blargh. Familiar with a fella named Georg Cantor? The amount of information encodable *onto* electron states via this method corresponds to the set of the rational numbers (no matter how many stinky ol' electrons you wanna use). The set of all possible electron states corresponds to the set of the real numbers, assuming that the wave's phase is continuously variable.
Imagine... a beowulf cluster of these.
Imagine... how much pr0n you could store on one.
Imagine... how much pr0n you could store on a beowulf cluster of these.
Are there Linux drivers available for these yet? I know BSD drivers are available, but Linux is always late with new hardware support.
I wonder if Britney Spears the lasers and optics physicist thinks of this breakthrough in, uh, reporting by EETimes (well hell, it's not like anything is PROVEN.)
My bet is with the Britster.
To posters in this story, please stop talking out your asses. It's pretty clear none of you are quantum physics and most of you seem to be operating off of high school level physics.
So please, if you don't know what you are talking about, don't post as if you do.
Let's see. One issue is how fast would my electron HDD take to read the last bit? I doubt you can force the electron to skip all 9*10^200000 bits to get the last byte. Another issue is size. I'd be happy to have an 1.5' cube in my box...so long as it's fast enough. You know this tech'll never reach ram chip size. It would be interesting, however, to see if you can bump this electron down a wire or fiber to make a ultra high bandwidth network.
You know, they have a word that describes that, its called analog.
Its true, in this increasingly digital world, the fact is that you can store more data accuratly with an analog device (Theoretically). I think people are too quick today to dismiss anything analog as obsolete and out dated. Perhaps digital technology has surpassed analog for now, but it may not always be so.
I am not the only one who thinks there is too much emphasis on the digital. There was a recent article in a Discover on a man building analog robots. (Discover, Sept 2000 Vol 21, No. 9, Pg 86: Biobots) I don't know if it is also covered on the website, www.Discover.com. Analog devices use waveforms instead of descrete steps. This means that there can be numbers or states described that are not rational. (PI anyone?)
Sorry, my soapbox
Hey! Is this the guy Scotty gave the recipe to transparent aluminum to?
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
In mathematics (or at least the kind I know of), 'countable' is a technical term meaning that the set can be placed into one-to-one correspondence with either the whole set of natural numbers, or with a finite subset of them (the former is said to be 'countably infinite', the latter 'finite'). The term 'uncountable' referes to the case when there are 'too many' of something to give each one a unique positive whole number (for example, the real numbers -- or any power set of an infinite set).
John
John_Chalisque
You mean by 'cardinals' the set of natural numbers? There is no set of cardinals, in the case where you allow infinite cardinals (where by 'cardinal' I mean one of the 'cardinals', which is the proper-class of transitive sets well-ordered by inclusion).
'Trasitive' in this sense basically means that X is transitive if and only if for every subset Y of X, Y is also a member of X. 'Well-ordered by' means that every subset has a smallest element with respect to that ordering.
John
John_Chalisque
If anyone has ever read the Broken God series by Zindel, one thing he mentions in the final book is the necessity for a universe worth of storage to describe/simulate the universe perfectly.
This whole infinite storage thing is fairly wild, but I'm trying to get a grasp on the infinities here. Does this mean that we could then encode a description of the contents of the entire universe in one infintesimally small member of it??
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
This shit blows my mind.
;)
Yeah, it blew my mind, too. In fact, it was so mind-blowing I failed the course the first time through, largely due to my lack of understanding of that energy-well stuff. Truth be told, I still don't know what the hell an energy well is.
Of course, all that relativity stuff came easy after having read so many sci-fi books about space travel (particularly Speaker for the Dead). I breezed through that stuff.
Infinity isn't a number.
Of course one electron can hold an infinite amount of data. So can one bit, for that matter. All you lose is precision.
The theory is very interesting but how do you get the data in and out of an electron?
EOF
I can see the slashdot headline of 2024: Student gets electron confiscated for disributing illegal .mp9's over the hyperverse.
My other computer is your Windows box
I thought that an electron was pretty stable. I thought that you needed chaos to store data. Is instability a result of chaos? I don't want my electrons crashing just when I need the data.
Eagles soar, but Weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.
The question is: Is ist countable? If you have 2 infinite countable sets P and Q, then the union of P and Q is an infinite Set as well. Take a look at the hilbert-hotel. We have a hotel with infinite but countable number of rooms, which are all ocupied and an infinite but countable number of guests have just arrived. Say all guests: if there old room-number is n they have to move to room 2*n and to every new guest there room-number is guest-number*2+1.
So what about pi or sqrt(2)? We have any finite piece of Information in there, the trick is to find the location and length. So RIAA should ask the court to forbid things like pi.
Yes, an eigenstate is the same thing as an eigenvector belonging to a certain eigenvalue.
The difference is that you need to choose a basis for you state space to talk about matrices and vectors, while the notion of state is more abstract and doesn't refer to a particular basis.
This is simply wrong, though a very common misconception by people who read about (but don't necessarily understand) quantum physics.
"[...] I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," — Richard Feynman.
Cheers,
Lov Grover, who proposed the theory, has a website with links to his publicatiions.
I couldn't figure out from the abstracts which paper EE Times was referring to.
Imagine an race with a more advanced understanding of physics than us, which enables them to make something which works like a "FTL radio" - us sometime in the 21st century, maybe? If they practise SETI as we know it and don't mind being detected, they'll certainly want to ping the universe with their new signal in the hope of a reply from someone who can receive it. But they might not consider it worthwhile to send electromagnetic-spectrum messages as well, and not just because of disinterest in backward technology or communication with backward civilizations. For example, suppose that we humans (or trans/posthumans) do develop "FTL radio" before 2101. That would mean that we would have gone from the invention of radio communications to its surpassment in less than 230 years (Marconi was born in 1874, and received his first patent on radio communications in 1896) - a blink in the history of humanity, never mind the universe. That's a tiny window to attempt to hit with a communication system which takes many thousands of years to cover the distance between stars. If we came to the conclusion that other civilizations were overwhelmingly likely to make the same transition in roughly the same length of time (and one could happily give or take at least one order of magnitude), then why bother with radio SETI? The inhabitants of an alien planet with a similar history might well come to the same conclusion. A different alien planet might be interested only in the kind of meaningful communication which would be made possible by a sufficiently fast system. Or perhaps no-one on the planet would even have thought of the possibility that anyone out there was sending or listening for ET radio waves - possibly because that planet never stopped off at radio on its way to "post-radio".
Speaking, I admit, as someone who has no expert knowledge of SETI or electromagnetic spectrum communications, this would surprise me a bit.
Consider our own chances of being detected. We've sent out our own deliberate markers, but we've put out a much larger number of transmissions that were never intended for communication with aliens, and a much greater variety of them, too. It seems a reasonable assumption that any one of our deliberate communication signals would be much easier to find and recognise than any one of the unintentional ones. But if you weighed all our intentional signals against all our unintentional ones, could you really say that if an alien did spot one of our signals, it would probably be an intentional one? Let alone that they would be so much more likely to spot an intentional signal that it wouldn't even be worth keeping an eye out for unintentional ones?
Our "SETI types" obviously shouldn't be looking for clones of 20th century Earth, but it seems likely enough that a detectable inhabited planet with might be in a similar position to Earth in this respect (or in the more extreme position of not making any deliberate transmissions at all) that looking only for deliberate transmisions would be unwise.
Other posters have picked up on the fact that the quantum state of the electron will have to be refreshed to prevent decay and thus data loss. I believe that there will be another fundimental problem with this approach. They are using super-position of wave functions to store the data in the electron, but whenever the data is read back, the wave function will collapse and the data will be lost. For this reason this will probably never be practical for large amounts of static data storage, but has more promise as a ram-type technology.
I seem to read from my physics textbooks that thermodynamics define the minimum energy required to record a single bit of information; at 3.2 degrees Kelvin, you would need 4.4E-16 ergs to set or clear a bit. So doesn't it mean whichever way you go, storing an infinite amount of information requires an infinite amount of energy?
Really? Please just post a link, or more info.
The mathematics of infinities (both countable and uncountable) is odd, but the short answer is "the same amount". Think of it this way - there are the same number of odd integers as there are integers as a whole (ha! bad pun!), because every integer (odd or even) can be mapped onto an odd integer by multiplying it by two and adding one. So 1 -> 3, 2->5, 3->7 etc, and we have a one-to-one correspondence between integers and odd integers, so there are the same amount of each.
Of course, the article doesn;t specify the type of infinity involved...
For now it is, but the FCC is petitioning God to modify quantium mechanics to implement watermarking and copy protection.
FUCKING read FUCKING the FUCKING fucking FUCKING article
Whohoo! Forgot to hit "anonymous" before posting -that- bit of flamebait :)
Not true. This is the "infinite square well" setup. If the potential outside the area you're considering is truly infinite (i.e., 0 between points A and B, and infinite everywhere else), the electron is guaranteed to be between points A and B. If the potential is really high, but not infinite, then there is a non-zero probability that the electron will exist outside the well. I believe that the probability goes something like exp[-potential], but it's been a few months since I had any quantum (goddam Ph 2B).
There are some other interesting things that go on with these particular boundary conditions (something with sines and cosines), but I forget. Check out an intro Quantum book for some more info.
-Chris
The good news is that you can put all of Napster on a single electron.
The bad news is that you need 12 tons worth of equipment to play the music.
I had rather thought that seti relied on the fact that there were alot of stars, at differnt distances. So it's not like we're scanning for anybody alive now in the whole universe, but rather that the universe is split into various sets (determined by distance from us). The assumption being that each set is big enough to contain at least a few of the presumed civilsations alive at that time. The older sets are obviously bigger, but also fainter.
Just think, you may have created a monster! :-)
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Did you read the article?
Quantum phase storage manipulates the phase of the electron field NOT the spin of the electron.
"Our wave packets enable us to engineer atoms by adjusting the amounts and quantum phases of an atom's electrons"
I can't fathom the implications of this in a regular state of mind....sheeesh!
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
The underlying principle behind this has actually been discussed for quite awhile; this is the first time I have seen anyone propose a practical use for it.
:>). This aspect of quantum physics is, I believe, called the theory of non-locality.
I wish I could remember the article where I originally read this, but it is called the holographic theory of quantum physics, so named because something about the photographic qualities of holograms allows them to be non-local, i.e. one small element of a hologram can be developed into the entire image. Apparently this has a quantum physics analogue...electrons are also non-local, and therefore one electron could theoretically contain all the information of the universe. (Can you tell I'm not a physicist?
So if this is true, the amount of information stored wouldn't really be infinite, just very large...unless you consider the universe itself to be infinitely large.
Isn't the resolution that you can define between two different states also equal to the uncertainty?
For instance if the incertainty was 5, yes I could have any of the states from 1-100, (and all the fractions inbetween) however, I couldn't tell the difference between state 4 and state 6 because I can only say that this state is state 4+-5, and the other is state 6 +-5.
Doesn't violating this break the uncertainty barrier? (I can't measure 5mV on my voltmeter, so instead I'll bump everything up to 5V and then it will tell me the difference between 5V and 5.005V)
I might be wrong, but I just got done with a 3rd year physics class and this was my understanding.
How long? - Let's assume that you can read a single bit out of this electron in one picosecond. (10^-12 seconds). Each additional bit would double the read time (because of Heisenberg, and friends). My copy of DeCSS weighs in at 3145 bytes after being compressed with PKzip 2.50. This is 25160 bits. So, 10^-12 * 2^25160 ==> 8.2*10^7561 Seconds, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the lifespan of the universe. Of course, cutting things down to size by doing parallel processing would help. The most bits that could be read in 1 second would be 39.9, assuming no noise, etc. The practical limits of Analog/Digital conversion technology are past 24 bits of resolution, but not much more, so don't count on getting DeCSS into less than 1049 atoms any time soon. ;-)
--Mike--
Maybe you're talking about some kind of evolution that I can't even imagine (and I would think you couldn't either, but perhaps I'm wrong). But, such an alien would presumably be aware of spatial dimensions. Radio waves would appear to them to be extensions of a wave phenomenom into many spatial dimensions.
Again, maybe these aliens would be just as aware of things on a very small spatial scale as large and not think much of such a thing, but one would think that they wouldn't ignore large wave patterns that seem to be generated by intelligence extending out across many thousands of light-years of space.
I would think that such aliens would be able to more immediately grasp the significance of radio waves (and all electomagentic spectrum phenomenon) than we are and would have uses for them (bouncing them off of other wave phenomenon, art, who knows). As I said, maybe I just don't have the imagination necessary to posit your aliens.
-Jordan Henderson
Thank you very much for your kind words. I often wonder (like perhaps many people do) about potential connections between the quantum reality of physicists and our networked world. Maybe no connection at all and all we are seeing are the natural results of network effects and wishful pattern matching, when you seem to get unexpected synergies coming at you.
One question I have is whether the "waveform collapse" of entangled systems is complete even for very weak environmental interactions like gas molecules bouncing off an object. Come to think of it, if I had a thermal random number generator in my laptop, would its chips be entangled to any degree each time a new number was generated?
If anyone knows of an online forum for this kind of Q&A or similar articles, would appreciate information.. thanks again.
Yes, this is what I meant. There have been a number of announcements of multi-qubit computers being made out of groups of ions, individual atoms, or what have you. The SciAm article I referred to was about this, the author was a scientist in the field and had invented a search algorithm which used superimposed states in the quantum computer. It apparently was proven to be the fastest such search algorithm possible.
/. noted), with the limit being around 14 or so. Maybe this limitation has nothing to do with qubits made out of one atom-wide wire or dots in a semiconductor chip. I was just thinking that if you could take one electron (or an atom, or a group of a bazillion atoms) and impose a bit pattern of arbitrary length on this single piece of matter, then there would be no qubit limitation.
But this and other articles have noted that there is a limit to the number of quantum bits (qubits) that can be assembled in a reasonably stable fasion. I do not know why, but I think we are up to between 4 and 7 qubits (IBM built something recently I think
I'll look on the net some more (more than I usually do), thanks.
The suggestion of modifying plastic to have metal characteristics by modulating these Coulomb potentials their laser can access is very wild. I remember a science fiction story (Doc E.E.Smith's lensman series, or possible A.E. Van Vogt.. or the Rama series?) in which the skin of a space battleship was strengthed to withstand weapons that would destroy ordinary metal in an instant, by using "molecular force generators"!! Sound familiar? I suppose if you just shined your laser on a corner of the piece of metal, the entire metal structure might be strengthened.. neat!
Ummm... actually, i=sqrt(-1) is a perfectly valid value in the universe.
It's just that it took a long time for people to discover it hiding in the framework of mathematics. It made people nervous as well hence the original term "imaginary number". The ancient Greeks discovered the irrational numbers and had to hide them from the general populace for fear of mass panic.
The fact that it is required for QM (and QED among other things) is what forced people to recognize the reality of "imaginary" numbers.
---CONFLICT!!---
That particular example would do more than put a strain on the process. "Reinserting the waves" would be adding a driving force to the system. Given that the need for this is the damping force of the tub walls, we would have a damped driven system. Since the driving force would be continually increasing eventually it will turn chaotic.
---CONFLICT!!---
It's a good thing you cannot patent elect... um. Wait.
I didn't say this. Don't want any ideas emerging here...
Home Page
Is for someone to encode DeCSS in an electron :)
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
energy available is not a limiting factor. One practical limit is that the highly excited states are very closely spaced in energy
Yikes! So a core dump might involve a rather large mushroom cloud?
- Isaac =)
Sure, you could store every mp3 on Napster in one electron. There's just one problem: where do you plug it in?
The point is, if they wanted to send a message to emerging civilizations they wouldn't use whatever method of communication they use themselves, they would use something easily understood by an emerging civilization.
That's what SETI is looking for - an intentional message.
-Pete
Host: "Our guest today is Mr. Luxury Yacht."
Luxury Yacht: "It's spelt Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove."
-Pete
The "SETI types" are not hoping to intercept traffic not intended for broadcast, they are looking for a deliberate attempt to communicate. If there are advanced civilzations that feel they have something important to say to emerging civilizations then they will say in as obvious a manner as possible.
-Pete
-Pete
I like quantum physics because it makes it so obvious that the universe is a simulation running on god's computer. I don't like this article because it would seem to suggest otherwise. :)
------
And i was so amazed about my friend buying a 60-gig... Mmmm... So, there is a possibility for infinite data in that little zap my moniter gives my finger every time i turn it on?
Where are my GPFs? I WANT MY GPFS!!
I'm by no means qualified to answer this, but there is something called Quantuum Computing, or the like. Search on it on the Net, it's really interesting (but I can't explain it well, so I better not speak about it ;)
;)
It's vastly different than normal computing though, because you're dealing with different states in your machine _at the same "time"_. Fork() just got beaten
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
And I thought todays computers couldn't handle much Static electricity, imagine upgrading this.
- Knut S.
Aww, who cares about storing only mp3s in a electron, why not the whole internet.
:)
Would be quite time cosuming through
A collection of electrons and other elementery particles can also hold an infinite amount of information. Think of a stone. If we were to establish a reference position, any other position in the universe would contain relative information. Throwing the stone would give a stream of random numbers, and leaving it sitting would be memory. The problem comes in trying to read all of the rocks. Each grain of sand could be trying to tell us something, or it could just mean nothing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not to speak for someone else, but I think that he means to say that the natural history of this alien species may not have allowed for the invention of radio waves. That is, they may have not discovered the value of radio waves because they have better methods (i.e. micro waves). We discovered radio waves first b/c they were easier, but let's pretend these aliens have sensory organs dedicated to detecting microwaves (sorta how we have organs dedicated to sensing sound waves), they may have never found the use for radio waves. Anyhow -- that's someone else's post, and I probably shouldn't bother trying to guess what they meant.
You like science?
You like science?
You like Bottomquark.
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
You're statement is the only thing that is simple and wrong.....
infinity^2 is infinity.....it is uncountable has no values....therefore traditional mathematics do not apply
I think the key to the article is the last line where they say they have yet to see for how long they can store the information. An electron that is not in ground (or lowest energy) state will quickly decay to a lower state (in about 0.1 microseconds in Hydrogen atom). Since they use these states to represent the data, if the electron decides to make a random jump down, everything will be erased. Or in higher states, there is the possibility of the electron jumping off the atom, creating an ion.
So then, how much data can can an angel on a pinhead process in a given time?
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
Any alien civilization that would neglect less advanced species scientific pursuits would be better left undiscovered by us. You seem to forget that the smart 'SETI types' aren't searching for the interstellar phone calls of an alien race, they are looking for markers or buoys or sentinels. If this advanced race would abandon all technology once the latest has come out, then I would not consider them more advanced then the fools on our planet.
Pax Digitalia
This might just give new meaning to the old saying "my dog ate my homework."
Yeah - even without a complete model framework for quantum gravity, if you take into account the Holographic Principle, there is a theoretical limit on the amount of information stored in a particular location: 1 quantum bit per Planck area.
Numerically, if you have some super high density quantum ram dimm with a surface area of 10cm, it could contain theoretically as much as 10^{67} bits of information (that's about a million trillion trillion terabytes of storage - plenty of mp3's...).
Of course, this is just in theory... practical limits will be hit loooooong before that.
-jake
The problem with unintentional singnals is that many of them will be impossible to detect (by any means we know of) in just a few lightyears (because of a backgrould noise in space), and it gets harder as technology advances more. There is two reasons for this: compression and directional transmissions.
First compression (and possible encryption) will make signal itself look more ol less like random noise and then the transmissions themselves are usually directional so they can't be detected expect from relatively small area (and use lower power anyway). Then there is already radio transmitters which use several different wawelengths to transmit the singnal (most current uses are military, I think, but civilian applications are already coming). To sum it all: the unintentional signals we are now putting out are both harder to detect and weaker in the first place. And continue getting more so.
(And to make things really challenging, quite a many frequencies get absorbed or reflected in the athmosphere and couldn't be detected even from geosyncronous orbit. I think that I read somewhere that we would be able to detect our own level of civilization only from something under 100 lightyears unless it delibitely put out a signal to our direction.)
So the people is pursuing a dream that is not viable. Uhh...I mean the people IN THE ARTICLE is pursuing a dream that is not viable.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
The next post after yours answered your question succintly. Provided of course, we believe that the planck scale puts limits on "information".
Seriously, I doubt if we can actually answer the question, until we figured out what quantum gravity is : then we can make conjectures about whether or not we can store information at planck scale physics.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
sadly, that's about the only thing I have time left to do :)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
- All the old National Geographics that everybody seems to have collected for some strange reason?
- Maybe the Congressional Record or Internal Revenue Code? About time we got some good use out of those... Yeah, I know that they're not quite infinite yet, but just wait 'til next year!
- Perhaps the phone numbers of all the girls who won't go out with me?
- We could always store the coordinates of all the points on the perimiter of the Mandelbrot set.
- Of course, we could just load it up with the digits of pi or e, but that's kind of boring.
- The authoritative compliation of all the troll postings on Slashdot?
- We could always use the lyrics to "Infinite Bottles of Beer on the Wall", but after the first few hundred thousand bottles we'd probably be slurring too badly for anybody to understand it.
I'm pretty sure that I might have missed a source or two...If the media is fragile, if a solar flare can eat your homework, then there is additionally the cost of electron RAID.
But of course, the evil genius who wants to program the human genome and AI gene splicing software into his plague of nano-robots will need nano-sized storage and probably won't be too concerned about the costs.
In other words, the more accurately you measure the 'place' then the time becomes less certain. I'm not sure what this would mean in real terms; maybe the more data you store the longer the latency to retrieve that data ?
Sorry, a hard drive is 'analog', with it's fuzzy little magnetic dots. And the pits in the cd rom, they are not all exactly the same size either. I could go on with this but I am sure that you get the picture.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Oh, ok, another electron. Alright then, where would be get this infinite amount of data from???
no sig
Ah, but what you're forgetting is that with the proper cognitive ehancement utilities, dogs and other pets could indeed get to the same level of intelligence as humans. For example, perhaps a silicon chip, containing a multiphase device which interacts with electrons containing the entire base of human knowledge. Now, the dog would have access to all of that, and , perhaps a second electron containing algorithms on how to talk, do math, etc.then, these would be interfaced to the dog's normal brain through a Dog Brain API, which would be run (the interface controller) by a microcomputer running Freesco , to route between normal brain synaptic connections and human-info driven connections. Therefore, the dog might be able to comprehend at least the level a highly intelligent human could .
Thanksno sig
I guess only if the electron didn't have any states defined on it as of yet. Then the particular information could be coded into the first free states of the new electron's wave oscillation.
no sig
the article mentions a bathtub, but, though the waves in a bathtub are all existing simultaneously, they eventually hit the edge and dissipate. the computer could recover the information just before it hit the end of the bathtub and then reinsert it towards the middle of the tub, but this puts definite strain on the entire process, especially power issues. if power was lost, all data would be lost. i see it as a dead end.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
Someone should convince the MPAA that having all available movies on a single electron is not only possible but, only a few years from mass comercial development.The MPAA would do almost anything to stop this from occuring, and probably would be willing to settle for deCSS for Linux GPLed and freely downloadable to all, probably even fair use of DVD Ram (and other TLAs) ;-)
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
If you can theoretically store infinite data, would you have to wait an inifinite amount of time to find a particular piece of datum?
:-)
Actually the problem would be finding the correct state at all. Building a sensor to discriminate between states as the number of states becomes larger and approaches infinity, the difference between different states becomes smaller.
Kind of like cutting a pie into more pieces. Finding a unique pie piece #5 of eight is much easier than finding pie piece #1,225,517 of 12,375,614,827,530. Get the idea?
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
mmm, is that RAIE (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Electrons)?
We had one damn story that didn't reference Napster, RIAA, MPAA, or DeCSS?
Off course there are limits to how much information they can hold in the electron, but those are limits of practicality.
Consider an electron on hydrogen with a quantized energy level n (an integer). Let n be our stored data. How big can n be? How much data can we store? Just because n is an integer doesn't mean that there are finite n's. n can be as big as we want.
But in practice, as n gets very large the difference between n and n+1 is very small and very hard to distinguish. This is where Quantum Mechanics begins to look like Classical Mechanics. Where things seem continuous but are really just big floating point number.
And where the hell are you going to put an atom with an orbit as big as a bacteria cell.
Now with more complicated atoms you have more electrons and more states. Say you had 8 electrons in the outer shell, each with quantum numbers n, l, s, m_l, and m_s. Then you have a lot more room to store info before you reach the limits of practicality.
My understanding of quantum gravity is weak. Please answer me this question.
Given that space time is quantized: space is a foam and time is sliced into Plank seconds.
How does that say that I cannot make my quantum numbers n and l as large as I like?
I know there are practical limits, but theoretically how does a foamy space-time restrict things like that.
Shoot, knowing my luck the vacuum/emf environment would be comprimised by one florine atom, and then I would just have a worthless neon atom.
We'd have to use something other than lasers to read/write on electrons. Lasers are still waves; they can't "see" anything that would fall between their peaks and valleys, and electrons are many orders of magnitude too small.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Simple, but wrong.
Two electrons would hold infinity ^ 2 (infinity squared). The number of unique states that can be represented is your base number (infinity) raised to the power of the number of digits you have. In this case each electron is a digit that represents an infinite number of states.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Hell, let's calculate a simulation of the universe to see where exterterrestial life might be. Or when (and if) the human race will die off.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Actually, infinity is quite often recognized in quantum physics. Disturbingly often in fact. Infinities and negative infinities get added together to form finite numbers. They call this "renormalization". Here's an example, quantum electrodynamics states that the bare energy of an electron is negative infinity. But an electron is always surrounded by a cloud of an infinite number of virtual photons. Photons are constantly plucked from nothingness and absorbed by the electron. Since the electron constantly absorbs these infinite number of photons, it's energy is negative infinity + positive infinity. This somehow results in an energy of 10^-19 Joules. These infinities can never be separated, they just magically cancel out.
More relevantly, physics also states that any charged particle exerts a calculable force from any finite distance away. The force only drops to 0 when the distance is infinite. This yields an infinite number of energy levels, but all are quantized. The infinities don't result from infinite packing in space, which the uncertainty principle disallows. It's just that quantum states spread out to an infinite distance. But then of course the universe is finite in size.
Er, infinities and Real Life mix just fine, thank you,
Finite and quantized are not equivalent. The set of cardinal numbers is a quantized set and at the same time infinite.
You only need intermediate values if your set is doubly bounded. If you need infinite values between two discrete states, then you can't have a quantized set. That doesn't seem to apply here...
What if we lose this one?
Rambus
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
"The dog ate my homework" will be an old excuse. Soon we'll have much better ones.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
electrons from Maxtor will be much less reliable.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
I bet then the technology would be outlawed under the DMCA
Software manufacturers will find a way to encrypt their software on these new distribution platforms.
Two weeks later, the encryption keys are distributed on slashdot.
Computer Science Curriculum will include more physics and less programming.
Stephen Hawkins will overthrow Microsoft and become the next Bill Gates.
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It'd be interesting to see what a sort algorithm looked like or an optimized query to get the data back. Storing the data is only one part of the equation. If you can theoretically store infinite data, would you have to wait an inifinite amount of time to find a particular piece of datum?
Also, what of bit rot, particle mutation or the particle dying?
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I agree it's difficult to imagine beyond that which we know, and that's mainly my point. Each time humans discover a new technology, such as electromagnetic waves, we assume that our advancement is near complete, and that surely other civilizations should use, or exist within the limits of, the same technology. Within the span of our existance, we discovered electromagnetic waves just a minute ago. Surely there is much more to learn. We have such limited views, based on our existance within 3-D space and 1-D time that we don't even know if we're really limited, except from hints of indirect observations in the quantum world, and other clues that appear like particle pairs appearing in a vacuum from "nothing". Imagine what it would be like to be a 2-D creature, like an amoeba but intelligent. It could only infer the existance of 3-D and depend on mathematics to "visualize" a dimension that can't be observed, and possibly manipulate objects within the extra dimension only after becoming much more intelligent than we humans are today. Electromagnetic waves, including radio waves, may just be an artifact that we experience based on our 4-D ability to observe the natural world. Instead of a sphere, maybe we only have the ability to see a circle... or just a point... or maybe the vibrations of a more base medium that is affected by the passing of the sphere, without knowledge that the sphere even exists. Remember, we were able to observe light long before electromagnetic waves. Our concept of light is just an artifact of the true nature of electromagnetic waves. Would it make sense to use a film projector to project a greetings movie into space? Aliens may find it equally stupid to proprogate radio waves into space. Also, we are limited by our relatively constant inertia through time. If other civilizations don't share this limit, then the propogation of waves through time might be meaningless. In the end, I think we humans have no idea what "reality" truely is, so these examples I've given are also meaningless, BUT I think we can accept the fact that "reality" is so far from even our wildest imagination that we can't assume that alien beings also hear and see the way we do. (Of course, I'm only human so what do I know.) ;^)
Quite honestly I was just amusing myself with that post. Moderators are obviously fools.
This post kicks anus.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
How do you pronounce that word? "eigenstates"
Thanks!
For those of you that don't know a yottabyte is around a trillion gigabytes.
God I hate articles like this. I would be even more blunt (and yes IAAQCR I am a quantum computing researcher): using a single electron to encode information is EXPONENTIALLY COSTLY and hence PRACTICALLY USELESS.
Storing k bits of information in the wavefunction of an electron will require resources (energy expendature for example) which grows like some constant to the power of k.
Of course one can store an infinite amount of information in a real number (say the length of your big toe), but the cost of measuring that length becomes exponentially prohibative as you acquire more digits of accuracy.
You could think of this as the "lets make storing and retreval of data an NP complete problem" solution.
dabacon
famous computer science conjecture: N does not equal 1.
Why don't we start simple, with ONE bit per electron. Once that's reliable, then try 16 bits per electron, then on and on. My quote below also applies to these rumormongrels that started this by writing the article.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
A surprising move in the Napster saga is sure to bring the ire of the RIAA. Utilizing a newly released technology dubbed "electron encoding", the entire contents of Napster has been transferred to a single electron. Users are then copying the contents to their own electrons, using a new high-tech network they call "Zapster".
In a twist of irony, the initial electron used to start the Zapster network was taken from a dandruff flake secretly gathered from the head of Hilary B. Rosen, President and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). When asked about her own unlikely contribution to Zapster, Ms. Rosen refused to comment, relaying all questions to her attorney. Inside sources, however, revealed that following the incident, aides were sent to the grocery store to buy massive quantities of "Head and Shoulders" shampoo.
Infinite data in the Universe is no proof that God is not running us as a simulation on his computer, because He/She/Thing has got the universe stored on his own electron.
Play Command HQ online
From article: "Our work in quantum-phase registers is highly experimental, but theoretically there is really no limit to how long a string of 1s and 0s you can store in one," said Bucksbaum. So, something here is wrong, theoretically.
Yes, energy is one problem. If there exists minimal amount of energy needed for storing one single bit, for unlimited number of bits you MUST have unlimited amount of energy. We do not have that practicaly or theoreticaly.
On the other side (just theoreticaly), if minimal amount for storing bit does not exist you can use as little energy as you wish for storing infinite amount of data. Too good to be true.
One word: Quantum. get it?
Since an electron can *supposedly* carry an infinite amount of information, wouldn't this imply that space is infinite in the microscopic level, and so that no matter what size we get down to, space never breaks down? (ie: you could "zoom in" as much as you liked and still get an image, so to speak") Maybe I should be studying my quantum mechanics instead of wasting time on /.
"Save me jebus!" - Homer Simpson (btw, I'm probably talkin out of me arse)
While all this is rather fascinating, dont forget, just because people say it's entirely possible to do it, doesnt mean that you're going to have the means to do it lying around in the back of your garage under the bench with the toolkit and the WD40.
And rather than all the stuff about storing an infinite amount of data on a single electron, what about the computational ability of that single electron? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have games that look and feel and sound just like real life (and still get over 100fps without hacks/mods), all powered not by an Intel box, but by a single tiny little electron.
Interesting thought, IMHO.
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it." -- Neils Bohr, 1927
"Nobody understands quantum theory." -- Richard Feynman, 1967
Kevin "Kayy" Beadle
Kevin "Kayy" Beadle
Site Admin, SQBNET
Umm ... correction: the union of two infinite sets is always infinite, regardless of whether or not they are countable.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Each electron could hold the same set of infinite data but in a different order.
Hello Pete,
While I bask in the warm glow of your pity for me, let me point out what is ''obvious'' to us, now, was not even known 200 years ago and the bulk of it will probably be ludicrously outmoded 200 years hence. And that's us, the same race, in pretty much the same environment just separated by 200 of your Earth years.
If there are *aliens* out there with advanced technology, there is no reason for it to even be *possible* for a human to understand or even recognize it as a system; after all, our brains are of a finite size. In the same way that a dog will never truly appreciate music (howling tunelessly along because of a certain frequency content aside), surely more advanced races than us would beat us out with no more difficulty than we lock doors in front of our pets.
Anyway, the point was that the mere fact that we are still stumbling over these epoch-making concepts tells me - maybe you more advanced mutants don't need telling - that we may well still be too pathetic to imagine what medium would be the lingua franca for interstellar beacons &c used by hypothetical superadvanced civilizations.
Ok, I'll take the bait.
* Infinity isn't a recognised value in the Universe.
Prove it. All I see so far is hand-waving.
It's easy to show that it's _impractical_ to build a device with an infinite number of states, but it's certainly _possible_ (if you have an infinite amount of room).
* Whilst those orbits may be "theoretically" valid, any orbit which does NOT coincide with a valid point in space (which is also quantized, and not necessarily with the same step size), is an invalid orbit and cannot be entered.
Check that high-school physics textbook. Orbital radius goes up as the square of the energy level - even at it's smallest level, it's much too large to be affected by the granularity of space.
* Any orbit which is excluded due to any other phenomina (eg: Casimir Effect) also cannot be entered.
Other forms of noise will limit practicality long before the Casimir effect does. Regardless, the casimir effect wouldn't make any of the orbits impossible. If you had enough room for the electron shell to exist, the casimir effect would be irrelevent for orbits in that shell.
The Casimir effect also wouldn't have much of an effect period; it just affects the number and wavelength of virtual photons present in a region of space. So what?
* Of the remaining orbits, any orbit which would cause the electron to shift which nucleus or other particle it is orbiting, will negate that orbit and replace it with the corresponding new orbit around the new center point.
So suspend a single atom in a magnetic trap in vacuum, as the experiment in the article almost certainly did.
This (requirement that nothing else be nearby) also still doesn't affect whether the orbit is _possible_. As I said before, measurement concerns are already known to limit how many states you can use with practical equipment.
* Exact positioning of an electron is forbidden by the Uncertainty Principle, anyway
As above - this is irrelevant. It is the uncertainty principle that _gives_ us the wavelength of the electron, among other things. The electron orbits are _definitely_ large enough for this to be a non-issue (as they're more than a wavelength in size).
Summary: I'm afraid that your objections are based on a variety of assumptions that turn out not to hold, both about the nature of the experiment described in the article and about my own arguments. If you are genuinely interested in this topic, I'd strongly suggest picking up a first-year physics textbook and browsing the sections on quantum mechanics and atomic structure. It will be well worth it.
Before you object - yes, the number of states between the ground state and ionization threshold is infinite, even with quantum mechanics. Check a high school physics or chemistry textbook, or work it out yourself from the formulae in the textboks. Valid orbits have a circumference that is an integer number of electron wavelengths (from one to infinity).
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that certain pairs of properties can only be measured to a finite degree of precision. There are only a few such paired properties: position/momentum and time/energy are the only ones mentioned in my Physics text [Physics for Scientists and Engineers Volume 2, 3rd Ed., 1991 Paul A. Tipler, Worth Publishers, page 1180]. Electron phase is not one of the effected properties, so Heisenberg doesn't seem to be a limit here. Shannon, on the other hand, may have something to say in the matter.
Have you rad the article? In what I understood of the article, it says that with a lazer the scientist induces a wave into the elctron, and then it's possible to read the wave stored in the atom.
The infinity of bits encoded would be stored in the time dimension, witch is infinity as long as I know. Then is want to store more data you just have to wait more to store it. It is something like a endless backup tape.
Things I don't know is do we have to wait for a specific point in time to start reading? Is there a limitation in the wave length, probably yes, for the reason above (it's a quantic value)? Does it run on linux?
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
How is the data stored in the electron ever read or modified? Last I checked, there's a prevalent little theory known as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Priciple states that observing an electron inherently implies changing its position/state. Since this theory is generally accepted by just about every scientist I've ever met, how is it that we're supposed to read data without modifying it in a possibly unpredictable way here? It's the same situation with transporters in Star Trek - they simply can't exist as long as this principle holds true.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
"Where'd my hard drive go? It was here a second ago!"
It seems that this is a step in the right direction for quantum computer, but how in the world would something allocate and infinite number of registers of memory. Would this "exciting" of the atom to which the electron belongs in someway eventually change the atom? How can it be possible that an infinite amount of data can be placed in one electron without it altering the spin or changing the atom in some adverse way. Anyway cool idea. How'd we get here anyway?
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
"Yeah, well, I got a new electron the other day, with the latest in quantum interfaces, so now I've got around 500 terrs of storage, more than enough to store my century of MP3s."
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END OF LINE
Yes, but they aren't storing analog information.
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Energy levels in electrons can be raised to stable values. Only when you knock them off the shelf do the return to a lower energy level and release a photon with energy equal to the difference betweent the prior and new state.
Theoretically it's true, but is there a practical way of measuring the spin of an electron that finely? Wouldn't Heisenburg make it so that the electron would be both blank and fully formatted until you bothered to read it? Or would the process of reading the data actually alter the data on this disk?
That and I think an electron would be a bit too small for storage purposes... I have enough problems losing CD-Rs half the time... no less a storage media where I could only know the angular momentum or the location, but not both...
This is all well and fun, except that the second you get almost any bit of matter near it your data is lost. Now if you could apply this to some particle that doesn't interact as promiscuously as the electron (neutrino?). But then, the less it interacts with, the harder it is to read it, much less capture and adjust its properties.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
yet ram prices are still going up??
how many electrons are there in ram? geez
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
"Now we want to find out how long information can be stored," he said.
Probably about 10 nanoseconds. Which is about as long as it takes for anything I put on a floppy to be lost.
:wq
Like "Egon Spengler" of the Ghostbusters, but with an "I"---and say the "on" as "en"---then add states.
As far as what they are, I couldn't say, but it probably has something to do with the eigenvalues of a matrix describing the electron?
--8<--
--8<--
That's one of the things I find so exciting. You could have a HUGE amount of redundancy built in. Why not store the same information on a bunch of electrons. Now if we can only get those electrons to change the state of other time and space separated electrons we would be in business! Instant communication and all that. I wonder how far we are from controlling THAT property? :)
--8<--
--8<--
It had all my homework and...
Badgers? Badgers! We don't need no stinkin' Badgers!
add compression and you can get past infinity.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
For those who like such things: For any set, take any function which maps it into it's power set (transforms each element of the set into a subset of the set). For this function, consider the set of all points which are not within the set which they map to. This set might be empty, but it is defined for the function. Whatever the subset, no point can be mapped to it by the function in question (think about it!). So there is an element of the power set which is not mapped to by the function. No matter what the function is. No matter what the set is.
perhaps its just a conspiracy, just one electron holds the data, and we pay the charge for "extra" memory. ;)
Well, I guess you would then have the biggest collection of badly encoded and half finished mp3's in the world.
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Basically, for those of you who haven't had any quantum mechanics courses:
The uncertainty principle says dXdP>=h. Where dX=delta X (position), and dP=delta P (momentum). h is Plancks constant (on the order of 10^-34). It basically says we can never know both the exact position and momentum of an electron. The more closely we measure one, the more error on the other.
As for the integral of the wavefunction, the probability of the electron existing from -infinity to +infinity will always be 1 (obviously). The weird part is that if you take an electron and put it in an infinite energy well, the electron is bounded to exist in the well. It gets funky in that there is a small probability that it will exist outside the well also!
This shit blows my mind.
-=God Hates Me=-
not the particle or "point". You're exactly right that the quantum world is so different than the macro world that most of the mental energies spent on the subject are wasted in translating abstract concepts between the two worlds. We humans have a lot to learn.
it seems very interesting to store infinite data into one single electron, but will it be possible to transfer this data to another electron?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent - Salvor Hardin
The fact that an observable (e.g. position) is quantized does not in itself mean it cannot have an infinite number of states. It's like the difference between integers and real numbers. Real numbers are continuous, whereas integers take discrete values (quantized if you like), however both has an infinite range of values (give me an integer, and I can alway add one to it.)
the union of two infinite sets is always infinite
That certainly sounds reasonable; however, as I understood the article, they are encoding their ''infinite data'' in the precise value assigned to what I think is called a scalar quantity (the phase, I assume, perhaps stupidly, expressed as an angle). So the first bit says whether it starts as 0 degrees or 180 degrees, the second bit adds 90 degrees if it is set, the third 45 degrees if set, and so on.
So this ''infinite'' data set boils down to a single infinitely precise number, say, 36.789...etc degrees. So that was one electron, perhaps full of an infinite number of Metallica albums. Now if we cp that electron to another one to give to a friend, but we added a Lene Marlin track at the beginning of it (having better taste than our friend), clearly it will end up with a different phase angle, even though it has an infinitude of contents (in different order). The phase angle will even be radically different if the first few bits of the added data are quite different.
Well, that is why I think your objection is wrong in this case:
-Andy
Like "Commander Taco" of Slashdot, but with an "I"--and say the "ommander Taco" as "gen"--then add states.
They're like a standing wave: they describe why electrons fall into particular orbits. You can read about it at [The Rotten Foundations of 20th Century Physics].
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
This means that what "should" be inifinite, given a purely Newtonian view of the world, will always become finite in a Quantum Mechanical view of the world.
Um, this technique is _based_ on quantum mechanics. This is clearly described in the article.
An electron orbiting an atom can be at any of an infinite number of energy levels between the ground state and the ionization threshold. The researchers have found a clever way to arbitrarily set the probability of the electron being in each of these states, simultaneously - which gives them as many bits of data as they have states. They also have a clever way of reading back out all of this state probability information.
Limits to this are based on the time it takes the states to decay back to the ground state (which affects the lifetime of the data) and the time it takes to perform the read operation (which isn't stated, but which almost certainly lengthens for the closely-spaced energy states near the ionization energy).
No limits from newtonian/quantum mechanics, just ordinary engineering tradeoffs.
Altering the phase of the electron in an atom equals exciting the electron. And from what I remember from school physics, excited electrons tend to "fall back" into place (revert to it's previous waveform) after some time, sending out the extra energy as light.
This means that a memory made up of electrons is a dynamic RAM, and must be re-updated all the time.
Since altering the wave == exciting electrons, it takes energy. And the more improbable states you want (higher shells in the old atom-model), the more energy you have to inject. Thus, the number of states are not infinite, but restricted by the amount of energy available/feasable.
If I remember correctly, someone posted an article some weaks ago, calculating the theoretical limits of a computer of a certain weight and size. From what I can see, this aproach to storing information does not break this theoretical limit at all...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
I got a question, hope somebody can poke holes in it. Say you have an unlimited number of states, and we ignore problems with how much energy or time you might need to get to that resolution.
Suppose you encode everything about a computer, its RAM contents and operating rules into a piece of data, basically a long number. Say you are doing something like dumping the VMWare PC emulator program and its memory buffers into this piece of data, along with your own program and also a bunch of other locations which are telltale bits that would only be set to true if certain instructions (your program) are executed in a certain order, so you can in a sense freeze a sequence of calculations, an overall machine state.
So in the end the last telltale will finally be set only if the results of the calculation which suposedly had been executed by this hypothetical (virtual) computer, was provably the answer you seek, i.e. the factors of a big prime number which could be multiplied together to show they are the right answer. A self-referential logic filter.
My conjecture (gleefully made without more knowledge of quantum physics than is available in lay publications..) is this. Could you use this huge number as a filter or reference beam to collapse the waveform of your recording medium, and read out the state of the virtual computer with the output of your program, in a picosecond?
It would seem that any Turing machine from a Cray to a ribosome (an rna tape device), could be simulated in this way, though smaller memory footprint/instruction set machines would be easier since they could be represented with less eigenstates. I wonder how many states would be the least amount necessary to simulate something useful.. if a full hardware abstraction is not needed and you can get away with just a language definition and virtual machine (yes like Java VM).
Would this mean you could run any program that can fit into the virtual machine in picosecond time? And if so, could you not in fact build a computer of any arbitrary capabilities by simply writing a pseudocode definition of how it ought to work? Final scary question.. The interior of a cell is a controlled environment and until the cell is queried by some process it is conceivable that some ribosomes could exist in superimposed states. Put another way, if you could solve the isolation problem it might end up to be cheaper to build the eigenstate computer with common cellular apparatus than by using big expensive lasers. What conclusions can you draw from this?
I think this is what was meant by a prediction I once came across.. that the coming century would create a new science of computing which is to today's computers as nuclear energy is to fire.
Like I said I hope someone can poke holes in this. The biggest problem seems to be universal laws about information, for example I understand that the recent sending of a light pulse at 300 times the ordinary speed of light was only possible because the leading edge of the pulse had enough information to reconstruct the rest of the pulse, suggesting that you could not send an entire packet of bits faster than the speed of light.
You're assuming that alien civilizations even know about radio waves. If they evolved with the ability to observe the "true quantum-wave reality" of our existence, then they might not be aware of the "radio waves" that appear as artifacts of some more fundamental medium. As far as we know, our precious "radio waves" are meaningless to other beings that may exist beyond our limited 4 dimensions.
If one electron holds infinite data, how much do two electrons hold?
First off, at the sort of level you're talking about (single electrons), you're talking about a world that obeys Quantum Mechanics, not Newtonian Mechanics.
This makes a big difference. Newtonian Mechanics is essentially continuous. Regardless of how close any two points are, Newtonian Mechanics assumes that there are still an infinite number of points between them, and that this can be repeated indefinitely.
Quantum Mechanics is a strange land of discrete points with NO space between them, as far as the particle(s) under consideration are concerned. Particles jump from one state to another, WITHOUT passing any intermediate point.
This means that what "should" be inifinite, given a purely Newtonian view of the world, will always become finite in a Quantum Mechanical view of the world.
Space, Time, Energy - these are ALL quantized.
The practical upshot? You may be able to store a LOT of information in an electron, but it won't be infinite. And how much you CAN store depends on what valid states there exist at that time, which may or may not remain the same over time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I didn't see it mentioned, but this must be taking place at very low temperatures.
When I hear about cool, promising advances like this is always makes me sorry for the SETI types. How the aliens will laugh themselves silly at our hopeful sifting of the *radio*/stone-age technology spectrum for traces of them, when an advanced civilization would have stupendously cooler ''magic'' at their disposal.
You are correct.....except that it is known that space-time _should_ also be quantized, so there is no such thing as "continuous eigenstates" , that's because QM is incomplete : we have not figured out quantum gravity yet (i.e. where it is believed that space-time curvature is also quantized).
I know..I know, all QM books say there are continuous eigenstates. But that's because QM works on the Minkowski flat space-time metric which is perceived as "background-fixed", i.e. not a dynamic metric like General Relativity's metric. The goal of physicists is to find a way to make QM "background-free", i.e. does not rely on a fixed-metric, or put it another way, to "quantize gravity" (which nobody really knows what it means, but people believed it means quantizing the dynamic metric, or "quantizing Space-Time").
So the people is pursuing a dream that is not viable.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
One of the challenges encountered with increasingly smaller data storage media is the possible damage caused by stray radiation... at this scale, one alpha particle could ruin your whole database! (or maybe one x-ray, or static electric shock, etc.)
Although it is interesting to see just how much information could be encoded in a single electron, one would need some redundant electrons in other atoms to also encode the same information. (Think:RAQE a Redundant Array of Quantum Electrons.)
Further, if we can step away from the concept of trying to encode EVERYTHING in just ONE electron, and take a look at how much information can easily and reliably be encoded in one electron (pulls a number out of his hat) say 4 bits, and one has (pulling another number out of his hat), say 10 electrons for redundancy, that's still one heck of a dense recording medium! Several terabytes of data could be stored in a very small space!
How small a space? There's the unanswered question of just how close together these can be packed and uniquely targeted by the laser. (Or lasers, to speed reading/writing to the electrons.) I see issues with just trying to keep the atoms in a fixed location, how finely focused the laser beams can be adjusted, etc.
Still, this sure holds promise for one incredibly dense storage medium for all my MP3s!
Call me cynical, but do those guys up in Slashland use MadLibs as a base for their stories?
[person] writes, "[person, lab] has
[verb]'d a way to [verb] the [noun]".
Wow. How many [contested file format]'s
could you [verb] with this??
[person] writes, "the [hated industry]
is [verb]ing [loved individual]". Ya know,
there used to be a day when [verb] was not
only legal but encouraged.
[person] writes, "a [greek letter] release
of [obscure linux app] has just hit [release
site]'s page. Hoo boy, now our world is
[adjective].
</HUMOR>
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Yes.
(though it depends wholy on the detail in which you can measure the state)
Imagine an arrow. It can spin on it's centre of gravity 360 degrees. If it points directly left the bit value is 1. If it points right the bit value is 0.
Going clockwise, pointing at the bottom half is for values the start with 0, the top half is for bit values starting with 1. Both have 180 degrees freedom of movement. Breaking the 180 degrees of each half into 2 points (3 sections) defines the second bit value. Iterate.
Keep going and breaking smaller and smaller sections to define further bit values. 60 degrees down left would be 00, etc...
Any real world thing (a bicycle for example) has an infinite number of possible states and your ability to reap binary values stops only at the limits of your measuring equipment.
(you know, I spend too much time amusing myself.)
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all