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IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Electron
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like we have another step forward in Quantum Computing - IBM has discovered how to detect and change the spin of a single electron. Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
"
IBM Detects and Changes Spin of Single Election.
Damn you Taco, and your politics section, it's corrupted my mind!
... are they certain?
If spin can be measured in a meaningful way, the entire future of politics is suddenly up for grabs. Imagine a "spin detector" built into the home television!
Wow. "You spin me right round, baby right round, like a record baby, right round, round round...."
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
the new spin doctors? j/k
How can we know it's so?
Electron 1: Oh my god! they've found us! what can we do? we are doomed!
Electron 2: Oh stop being so negative
I am the lord of the pun. Dance Knave!
so now that we can spin one electron, it wont be long before we can do the same to the trillions and trillions of them, right? wrong assumption.
I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
But they will have to dramatically increase the seek time of cats before this tech will be usable as a hard drive replacement.
You changed the outcome by measuring it!
It's good to see some tech companies actually innovate...
My website
I thought electrons were always tied with another one of opposite spin: if one is up, the other is down.
My mad physics skillz are pretty useless if whats going on isn't one big thing smashing into another big thing, so if someone out there who RTFA'd would like to tell me how this squares with Heisenberg, I'd be much obliged.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What will this affect exactly?
So this allows read-write of qubits, right?
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Whew, okay. After I RTFA I realized they hadn't done the impossible, just the really hard. IBM can measured the energy required to change the spin of a single atom not a single electron. (A prerequisite of this, of course, is detecting the spin of a single atom; but that's not that difficult with electron microscopes.)
So what do we do if quantum computers can decrypt anything in almost real-time?
All I can think of is making the data streams uninterceptable, which leads us back to encoders/decoders built using quantum entanglement.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
IBM has discovered how to detect and change the spin of a single electron.
Measuring the spin of electrons bound to atoms was first achieved in the famous 1922 Stern-Gerlach experiment, a key stage in the discovery and understanding of quantum spin.
However, to quote from this discussion of the experiment, the Stern-Gerlach technique cannot be used to measure free electron spin because 'The spreading of the electron wave packet washes out the separation effect due to the electron spin'. Therefore, it appears that IBM's discovery is significant.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
Of course by then we'll all be using quantum encryption techniques.
Overspinning electrons to overclock systems?
I'm quite sure the cat knows as well.
Mine mine! All mine! Your ideas are all mine!!!
A while back there was a proposal to have a public onetime pad system that worked like this. there is a server, perhaps a sattelite, that is streaming random numbers at say gigabytes per second. To encode a message you weakly encrypt a prior message to the recipient telling him a precise start time: say the message reads: start colleting your onetime pad at the first occurence of the first 5 digits of the number pi that come after 12 noon. you both then collect the data that comes at that time and treat ti as a shared one time pad.
you opponents may be able to decrypt the pre-message eventually but not it time to make the start time. thus they cant collect the onetime pad data. the data rate of the random stream is chosen so that no plausible storage system could retain more than say a few hours worth of the data, so no one could just record it all. As long as no one can crack your message on that time scale you can dsafely send the one time pad whihc no one can crack by technical means.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is the sort of situation where the Internet is more a hinderence than a help. Over time discussions such as this will polarize the lay community either for or against a particular area of research, wher two areas of research strive to achieve similar goals.
Public Opinion greatly influences funding of research, so I hope that premature dabates of which technology is superior, won't shape decisions to fund one or the other, since ther is the possibility that one or the other area of research might hit a brick wall at some time in the future, at which point it wll be nessecery to pursue the other area of study. It would be bennefitial to all to have continued both areas of research in parrelel. Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that discussions like this alone will influence the course of research, but merely that the colaborative enviroment the Internet offers will promote (suprisingly) colaboration to the point where only one research path will be pursued by both teams, working together, rather than competing, as it were.This is an area whewre competition is a positive thing in academic research. I merely question the degree to which the Internet actually contributes to this.
Were he still alive, Andre the Giant would have something to say about this sentence.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
What IBM doesn't relize is that the electrons they are tampering with once passed through a SCO Unix system...
TNG baby... we're getting closer to two of the Coolest Technologies Ever. Replicators and the Holodeck -
Replicator:
Today, we know how to create microchip circuits and experimental nanometer-scale objects by "drawing" them on a surface with a beam of atoms. We can also suspend single atoms or small numbers of atoms within a trap made of electromagnetic fields, and experiment on them. That's as close as the replicator is to reality. Making solid matter from a pattern as the replicator appears to do, is pretty far beyond present physics.
science of star trek
I heard it is locked in a box somewhere, but that may or may not be so. ;)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
They can change the spin on OReilly factor..
Original poster: Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
Andre the Giant: As long as someone knows where they left all the mob gems!
Stop that rhyming, I MEAN IT!
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
They don't know exactly where they did this.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Personally.. I kind of doubt that they may ever become 'mainstream'. A quantum computer isn't an all-around "improved computer", it's a completely different paradigm.
So the question here is: Why would they replace traditional computers? There is no real reason to think that they will replace conventional computers, except for in the areas in which they are better.
(and that's not likely to be every area)
Quantum computers are inherently much more complex than traditional ones. Thus, they will likely always be more expensive to build.
It's 2004, and we're still using internal-combustion automobiles. Cathode-ray tubes for data visualization. Nearly all elevators still use ordinary cables and breaks. We don't have nuclear reactors in our basements. And so on..
The moral here is: Just because a technology is better in some respect, does not mean it's going to replace an older one. Especially if it's not better in every respect, and not cheaper.
Two sodium atoms are walking down the street. Suddenly one stops and looks around.
The other sodium atom says "What's the matter?"
The first sodium atom replies "I think I just lost an electron!"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm positive."
From the article:
Over the past 15 years, Eigler has led a group of young scientists who have pioneered the use of atom manipulation in wide-ranging experiments aimed at building and understanding of the properties of atomic-scale structures and exploring their potential for use in information technologies such as digital logic and data storage.
Let's see... if they were 25 when Eigler started, they're now 40! Not so young anymore!
(it's a joke. laugh.)
Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
Who's this "we"? I still can't get my VCR to stop blinking 12:00...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
How much you want to bet that the NSA already has this technology, and already solve impossible encryption problems?
Green acres is the place to be
Farm living is the life for me
Land spreading out so far and wide
Forget Manhatten, just give me that country side
No need to thank me.
Whats the name of that effect that says that for every electron in top spin there is a mate in down spin somewhere? And if you change the spin of one, the other mysteriously changes? Why doesn't my cell phone have this and will this get us any closer?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It's uncertain.
So.. it has come to this
do we have gigabyte per second data links right now? yes. so just make the delay from the pre-message as large as need be to assure no plausible storage device will work.
Finally if this delay approaches the speed of decryption then stack the encrypted message with another layer of encryption inside.
if that is still not good enough then send the mathematical algorithm in english for decrypting the second message encrypted in the first--this gaurentees a human has to write a program to do the second decryption since no computer could actuall decipher it. for example inside the first RSA encrypted message I simply write the following message "at the end of this sentence you will find a message that has been encrypted in rot12 and then added usung chinese arithmatic to the text on page 11 of the novel "the key to rebecca"'. that will take a human a while to write a program to solve this.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Solving encryption problems, or cracking?
:-D
Quantum computing is cool, and all, but I think we're going to need more than just one electron working for us.
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
I certainly hope they decrease it.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
This is a big step forward in spintronics, not in quantum computing. Quantum computing is predicated on the idea that solutions to the Schrödinger equation can be a linear combination of several single-state equations; this is the case with any higher order differential equation. By detecting or explicitly setting the spin, you force the solution to be only one of these equations, and the quantum magic goes away. Great news for spintronics (using spin, not charge transporation to carry information), not news at all for quantum computing.
`which fortune`
You can buy an electric or hybrid car now if you want. You can also buy a horse, or walk. You don't need an order from the President to junk your gasoline car and get an electric one.
Cathode-ray tubes for data visualization.
In five years they will be replaced with LCDs. Already new desktop computers come with LCDs (and all notebooks :-) CRT manufacturing is expensive, dirty and it will be phased out.
Nearly all elevators still use ordinary cables and breaks.
What's wrong with cables and brakes? Were we supposed to use something else already, like antigravity shafts?
It's true that being new is not enough to displace old. But if the new stuff is better and the price/performance ratio is good, it will displace the old products. Flat panel displays, for example, are light (one person can carry it) and they take less space (you can do more with your desk/room) and they take less energy (power bills and waste heat) and they offer very good contrast and sharpness, and they don't flicker, and they don't emit even the weak beta radiation that comes from CRT tubes. The cost is now about 2x over the CRT - big deal...
I think that quantum computing depends upon manipulating atoms and subatomic particles to some degree. So I think this leads to quantum computing the same way the train leads to the automobile.
But then again, read my sig.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
It's true that being new is not enough to displace old. But if the new stuff is better and the price/performance ratio is good, it will displace the old products.
My point exactly.
But, my point is also that, for some technologies, the price/performance ratio will never become good enough to replace the older one.
Mix the principle from this Random Lava Lamp Generator, a high speed multi-mega pixel digital and film with a suffiviently high resolution, pipe resulting image as raw key-data, and you're done...
or if you prefer "better randomness" (sic) use HotBits cesium decay generated random numbers and pipe...maybe not gigabytes of data ( (about 30 bytes per second, to be precise, sucks...but then...
Mix both obtained key with the obscure, non repetitive algorithm of your choice (a simple XOR will be enough) and you can start having pretty impressive figures...
Generating gigabytes of data is quite easy, an I agree with you that making sure they are truly random is much more difficult, but it's not really that impossible 8)
The real problem is making sure both people get the SAME timepad, the problem here being to have both people REALLY in synch when startng the capture to generate the pad...
which is another problem entirely...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
The Internet: Proof that a million monkeys with keyboards won't produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
No...but they will pirate it.
Sorry...I don't ever reply to sigs...but I just felt it was necessary!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Heisenberg said you cannot know both the position and momentum. But, you can tinker with more minor attributes with complete accuracy?
I'm also hoping someone will explain this.
--
Bush: Spending money the U.S. doesn't have to make his administration look good.
Some background about this...I hope I'm recalling this correctly:
What is really interesting about this is that IBM's technique is so sensitive that the scientist learned that it takes 6 percent more energy to flip the spin of atoms positioned near the edge of an insulating patch on the surface than for atoms in the middle of the patch. Such detail will be valuable in understanding and engineering the properties of future nanoscale spintronic devices.
And in addition to this an electron's spin has two possible conditions, either "up" or "down." Aligning spins in a material creates magnetism. Most materials are non-magnetic because they have equal numbers of up and down electron spins, which cancel each other. But materials such as iron, or cobalt have an unequal numbers of up and down electron spins and are magnetic. In their new result, the IBM researchers measured the energy required to flip the spin of a single manganese atom from "up" to "down."
Okay, one answer is that CmdrTaco got it wrong. He said, "IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Electron". He should have said, "IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Atom". Huge difference.
--
Bush's education improvements were partly fraud
Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
Nothing impossible to solve is solvable, and nothing unsolvable is possible to solve.
I think the word you are looking for is intractable.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Heisenberg is driving his car, when he gets pulled over by a cop. The cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"
To which Heisenberg replies "No, but I know where I am!"
"Our spin detector says that's negative."
--
Now it make sense - they used the SCO press releases to tune the detector!
Step 1. Get a 1-bit quantum computer working
Step 2. Wire 1,024 of them together
Step 3. Break 1,024-bit encryption!
In reality, you now have the capability to solve 1,024 separate 1-bit problems. To solve a 1,024-bit problem, the electrons carrying each qubit need to be entangled with each other.
Keeping things in a state of quantum entanglement is extremely difficult. The most I've ever read about was 7 qubits entangled for less than a microsecond. Note that as the number of entangled objects (particles or molecules) increases, the operation gets exponentially harder. As the time to complete an operation increases, it also gets exponentially harder. Quantum computing boosters won't tell you this, but it is not just a matter of getting a prototype working and then making it bigger.
In order to change the spin on a single atom, they needed to use a scanning tunnelling microscope in a vacuum cooled to 1 degree kelvin, and presumably a clean room environment.
Not being familiar with the hardware required, for a functional quantum computer (for Joe Public values of functional) are we talking about enough machinery to fill a building?
If so, should I make a bold prediction that one day, there will be a quantum computer that fits in a single room? Maybe one day, there will be a quantum computer in every city...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Naw, he's in charge of the hard disc division that made the Deskstar GXP...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
1) detect and change the spin of a single electron
2)???
3)PROFIT!!!
Sure it will. Right after I receive my new, wall-sized television in a poster tube, unroll it, and hang it on my wall -- as I've been promised will happen any time now for the last 20 years.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or just get it from a truly random source - for instance perhaps use a sensor pointed at the sun that measures something it emits. No satellite required then.
Both the submitter and the guy who let this through should RTFA.
It's about a single ATOM
A-T-O-M
not
E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N
This could lead to incredibly high storage density [cat seek time joke deleted]"
But seriously: Did you notice some of the other related experiments from the same group, listed at the bottom?
One struck me: The inclusion of a single ferromagnetic impurity atom in a semiconductor, with its magnetization state producing a srong and extremely localized effect on the electronic properties of the semiconductor.
This might lead to a RAM where the storage element is a transistor with a single magnetic atom embedded in the "gate" region, turning it on or off depending on the spin of the single magnetizing electron.
Extremely tiny. Extremely fast to read (probably a ballistic-transport FET). Extremely fast to write (electron spin flips REALLY fast). Extremely low power (1/2000 electron volt needed to flip the spin).
And that's not even the most impressive thing in the list.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...and the neighbor's cat dropped dead. CURSE YOU IBM!!!
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Nobody will ever need more than 640 qubits.
Just sit right back,
and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic port,
Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day,
For a three hour tour,
A three hour tour.
(past nauseum)
There's got to be something about the memory works, and the way songs go into our brains. I suspect it's partly residue of our pre-literate cultural and biological heritage. The good old days, when history was oral, memorized, and in verse, not prose.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Reading the article, there is one big thing that happens when IBm detects the spin... THEY HAVE TO CHANGE THE SPIN, and then from that they can figure out what it was previously. To while they will be able to figure out one network packet of cypher text, the recieving side will notice the change, and the communication will be terminated. That is not even taking into account how long it would take them to measure the spin. which might lead to dropped packets. Not to mention they would have to grab all the packets and measure every single electron. Which means the Bob is not getting anything, when he is suppost to.
Sounds like someone is excited that "Star Trek" style Transporters are once again theoretically possible.
=P
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
http://news.nanoapex.com/
;-)
Why won't just ask Slashdot to post this link as permanent (along with wired.com )? I read it every day. They have diff. sections: nanotubes, nanoelectronic, nanoenergy, MEMS (nanomachines),... the first time I looked at it i became a nanoaddict
Just look at these nanoapex news regarding spintronics (reverse sorted by date):
Sep 03: Spintronics Breakthrough: Negative Resistance of a Single Magnetic Domain Wall Measured
Jun 23: Physicists Build New Microscope to Study Electron Spin
Apr 26: IBM, Stanford Collaborate on World-Class Spintronics Research
Mar 22: Silicon-based magnets boost spintronics
Feb 28: Spin valves open organic chip era
And that was just ONE topic. 'nuff said.
the cat is dead
http://p2pnet.net/story/2500
Spintronic electronic circuits exploit the magnetic orientation of electrons and atoms. Spin, in short. And it could lead to M-RAM - magnetic random access memory - among other things, say IBM and Stanford University.
Atomic holographic DVR disc drive inventor Michael Thomas, however, goes even further.
He wanted, and still wants, to use polarized UV photons with the same resonant frequencies as the ferroelectric molecule and electric fields to control electron movement, polarity, and EMF fields for optical display imagery and data storage applications.
"I invented new phrases like photon induced electric field poling, plasmonic physics, and ferroelectric spintronics to talk about the science," he told p2pnet.
No, it will not work. Assume, my pre-message is use NBC + ESPN as the feed. The pre-message is decrypted after 1 week. I assume the evesdropper can get the archives form the respective stations and decode the message.
Same principle applies to using a paticular satellite. We can get information from that broadcast station and replicate the feed. Agreed, all this is not possible for the common man. But then RSA with higher bits is sufficient for the common man.
That was the reason I suggested we use some natural source like cosmic background radiation or some other random event in space which everyone can observe. No one has the abilty to record all the events simultaneously for long time (at least currently and in the near future). But it also makes the system very less practical.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
A small difference in energy, but a large difference in Physics?
Maybe I overinterpreted, but I thought Heisenberg's principle prevented tinkering with the spin of an electron, and being sure of the result.
Can you explain?
Other companies have been working on this for several years now, and are much closer to a viable application of the idea. http://www.nve.com/
"10 years" is the equivalent to the last 5% of any given software project
This does not answer the question. Is it possible considering the laws of Physics to do the same experiment with one electron?
How exactly does quantum computing allow us to solve impossible encryption programs? I may not be a quantum physicist, but I do have some basic understanding. Of course I have a basic understanding of electronics as well but no idea how to make an AND gate out of transistors....
The bigger use I see for this new technology isn't encryption, it is end-to-end communication without the possiblity of interception. In this event, you simply don't need to encrypt the transmission because it is impossible to intercept it anywhere except the transmitting and receiving devices.
Also could have great implications for the space program as such information "travels" faster than the speed of light. Travels is in quotes because perhaps the information doesn't actually travel as we think of it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Besides the intrinsic interest in spin-related phenomena, there are two main areas which hold promises for future applications: Spin-based devices in conventional [1] as well as in quantum computer hardware [7]. In conventional computers, the electron spin can be expected to enhance the performance of quantum electronic devices, examples being spin-transistors (based on spin-currents and spin injection), non-volatile memories, single spin as the ultimate limit of information storage etc. [1]. On the one hand, none of these devices exist yet, and experimental progress as well as theoretical investigations are needed to provide guidance and support in the search for realizable implementations. On the other hand, the emerging field of quantum computing [8,9] and quantum communication [9,10] requires a radically new approach to the design of the necessary hardware. As first pointed out in Ref. Loss97, the spin of the electron is a most natural candidate for the qubit--the fundamental unit of quantum information. We have shown [7] that these spin qubits, when located in quantum-confined structures such as semiconductor quantum dots or atoms or molecules, satisfy all requirements needed for a scalable quantum computer. Moreover, such spin-qubits--being attached to an electron with orbital degrees of freedom--can be transported along conducting wires between different subunits in a quantum network [9]. In particular, spin-entangled electrons can be created in coupled quantum dots and--as mobile Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs [9]--provide then the necessary resources for quantum communication.
For both spin-related areas--conventional computers and quantum computers--similar and sometimes identical physical concepts and tools are needed, the common short-term goal being to find ways to control the coherent dynamics of electron spins in quantum-confined nanostructures. It is this common goal that makes research on the electron spin in nanostructures--spintronics--a highly attractive area. While we advance our basic knowledge about spin physics in many-body systems, we gain insights that promise to be useful for future technologies.
Stolen from: http://theorie5.physik.unibas.ch/qcomp/qcomp.html
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The energy required to flip between the spin states is only about 10E-24 joules. Is that the energy difference between the two states, or the amount to get over a "hump" separating the two states? If so, what is the difference between the two states, and can that "flipping" energy be recovered when the states are flipped back?
--
make install -not war
Please stop bringing up encryption every single time the word quantum apears.
It's more than mildly annoying.
I live in a giant bucket.
First of all, we won't be be able to crack any encryption.
Private-key encryption will still be just as safe (most likely).
Public key encryption based on factoring will be the first casualty.
Given the fact that patches, fixes, and reimplementations are developed and administered all the time, there's no reason to think that fixing vulnerable systems won't be a fairly trivial re-implementation of some sort. Even if a bunch of systems are left unpatched, it's a long way from IBM labs to some script kiddie's Quantum iPod.
There will be market-hyped hysteria, and a massive cottage industry of re-implementations of security protocols. Think Y2K but worse.
gears? we don't need no stinking gears
...the price/performance ratio will never become good enough to replace the older one.
I don't like words like "never" and "always". Science has a nasty habbit of making the impossible possible.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I ran your "Democrats are better drivers" table through my spreadsheet. I sorted on a new column, deaths per 100K licensed drivers, for the deathrate by actual drivers, not just people who live in the state. The order is nearly the same, with about four Bush states jumping up the killrate ranking, which is mostly a result of my using several decimal places of precision in the deathrate, while several of your "ties" are sorted alphabetically, rather than by their slim margin. That eliminates the supposed factor of "urban" Gore states having fewer drivers per capita, due to public transportation.
There's other criticism that "correlation is not causation". I don't claim that bad driving causes bad voting, or vice versa. But correlation this strong indicates a common causation. I'd say that the reckless driving is reflected in reckless voting. If only politics were wreckless.
--
make install -not war
Leave science out of it!
Not liking words like "never" has nothing to do with science and everything to do with human psychology.
So what do we do if quantum computers can decrypt anything in almost real-time?
We just hop on our flying cars and head to the nearest AI advice dispenser, who'll tell us what to do.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I'm really getting tired at the cracks people are making about
_ ________
encryption being broken once a "true" working Quantum computer is
made. Yes it is true today's current encryption will be broken but
wasn't it the same for the encryption used during WW1 and WW2?
As advances in digital technology increased people were able to break
the state of the art codes but at the same time, mathematicians who
knew of obscure types problems began seeing that these problems could
now adequately and efficiently be solved on a computer. Its not as if
binary arithmetic didn't exist 200 years ago, its just that it was so
pain staking to do it with the technology of the day that people tended
to go for shift ciphers and the like, once the automation of calculation
began to come into play, new problems which were really old problems
came into light. i.e.: RSA is based on a 2400 year old theory in
mathematics, need I say more?
So to make this short, yes Quantum computers if/when they eventuate into
a reality will definitely break today's crypto, but just like before
there will be people that will conclude problems that were thought to
be too difficult and tedious to solve with today's technology will see
possibilities of solutions through Quantum computers hence a new cycle
will begin until the next major computing break through, its as simple
as that....
Arash Partow
_________________________________________
Be one who knows what they don't know,
Instead of being one who knows not what they don't know,
Thinking they know everything about all things.
http://www.partow.net
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Well, it would be very cool if it was about changing the spin of an electron... Unfortunately, that's not what happened. They were able to change the spin of an ATOM, and it just goes on to talk about how electrons affect magnitism.
Now, if this had been about changing the spin of electrons (WHICH IT ISN'T) quantum computing is far from the most important advancement it would make possible... I'm quite sure the most important application would be instantaneous communications (faster than light).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
you have to pick it up in your personal anti-gravity hovercraft. Mine is on pre-order from Amazon.com. They keep slipping the ship decade though....
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If you are lucky enough to have half a brain, I think its great you use it to detect political spin. So many likely voters out there in TV Land don't seem to be as lucky. Whatever portion of a brain they have still seems insufficient to do the job. ;-)
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Yeah, they *must* be.
Because anything else is all scary.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
That's correct. Here's an example:
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
How dare you use your sig to brag about such a nifty toy, without at least linking to a few photos. I won't believe you until you do, so there.
sustainable living
That's correct; here's an example (another more technically involved example was posted by Wass about Quantum Mechanics using Commutors). The position operator is the same as multiplying by the position of the system. The actual position could be denoted as, x and the operator called position could be denoted as, x. So (g(x) is just there so you can see what goes on the other side of the operator - i.e. nothing):
g(x) x f(x) = g(x) * x * f(x)
Another operator is called the (one-dimentional) momentum operator. Say the acutal momemtum is written as p and the operator as, p. Well, unlike the position operator, p is defined as k d/dx where k is a constant (k = h-bar * (-1)^.5 ) and d/dx is the gradient along the x-direction (AKA derivative of whatever's on the right hand side). So:
g(x) p f(x) = g(x) * k * f'(x)
What Heisenberg says is that these operators don't communte. This is easy to see by an example:
g(x) p x f(x) = g(x) * p (x * f(x)) = g(x) * k * (x * f'(x) + f(x))
g(x) x p f(x) = g(x) * x (k * f'(x)) = g(x) * x * k * f'(x)
Since p x and x p give two different equations, they don't commute.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
One time pads - that'll screw your fancy quantum thingummy decryptor - HA!
A friend of mine claims he was told very emphatically once in a country that will remain nameless that "there will be no justice until we have flea erections"
You completely missed the point of my post.
Read it again, slowly.
Required reading for internet skeptics
No, I understood your post all to well. And it's bullshit.
By saying "Science often makes the impossible possible", you are putting blind faith in science.
Which is a viewpoint which runs exactly contrary to what science is supposedly about: Reality, not faith.
You expressed a view which only illustrates that you, like most people want to believe anything is possible. Human nature finds impossibilities unsettling, like other concepts such as mortality and infinity.
Science isn't about finding what people want to find. It's about finding reality. In reality, some things are impossible. I'm not even going to get into epistemology here, but it is unreasonable to think otherwise. Especially in economic reality, which is what I was talking about.
Go back, study some science, and some philosophy of science, and perhaps some human psychology and then try and realize what you are saying and why you are saying it.
You didn't read my post again slowly, did you?
The parent mentioned that he believed a particular technology would *never* be cheaper than the current technology.
This reminded me of quotes like "Man will never reach the moon" and "No one will ever need a computer in their home"
Hence my post -- Read it again, slowly.
You expressed a view which only illustrates that you, like most people want to believe anything is possible. Human nature finds impossibilities unsettling, like other concepts such as mortality and infinity.
No, I DO NOT believe that anything is possible. Nor is that implied in my post. Read it again, slowly.
By saying "Science often makes the impossible possible", you are putting blind faith in science.
Wrong again! I'm not putting blind faith in science. What I said is true. Science often makes the impossible possible. It was impossible to reach the moon. It was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound. It was impossible for man to fly. It was impossible to navigate beyond the sight of land. There are countless examples.
Science isn't about finding what people want to find. It's about finding reality. In reality, some things are impossible.
I never said that nothing was impossible. You drew this conclusion on your own, with no basis in reality.
I'm not even going to get into epistemology here, but it is unreasonable to think otherwise.
This is apparently a random excuse to use the word "epistemology" I wonder if you even know what it means...
Especially in economic reality, which is what I was talking about.
Are you the parent poster? I never bothered to look. Well, you can go on living in your little deluded world, where 640k is enough for anyone -- and only the very wealthy and big business will be able to have access to computers. (Me, well, I think that there is a world market for maybe 10 computers. There so damned expensive!)
Go back, study some science, and some philosophy of science, and perhaps some human psychology and then try and realize what you are saying and why you are saying it.
Didn't you imply in your last flame that human psychology wansn't science? See, I was under the impression that it was. Did you change your mind? Are you a different poster? Do you even know what your talking about? I highly doubt it.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The parent mentioned that he believed a particular technology would *never* be cheaper than the current technology.
Then you didn't read the post you replied to.
Yes I wrote it, and it said that certain, technologies will never reach a price over performance ratio that will allow them to completely replace the existing ones.
This is obvious.
No, I DO NOT believe that anything is possible. Nor is that implied in my post.
Yes it is implied. Perhaps you didn't mean to imply it, but that is something else. You are replying to a statement, "X is impossible" with: the statement "Science often shows impossible things to be impossible", without adressing the particular case in the least.
It's a blanket argument, and as such one must assume that you feel this way generally.
It was impossible to reach the moon. It was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound. It was impossible for man to fly. It was impossible to navigate beyond the sight of land. There are countless examples.
There are countless examples of people wrongly stating that things are impossible. So? That's called false induction. That does not disprove what I wrote at all. By analogy, you could compile a big list of people wrongly stating "The city X is in the USA", and come to the conclusion that any statement about American geography is wrong.
This is apparently a random excuse to use the word "epistemology" I wonder if you even know what it means...
Yes I do. Apparently you don't, otherwise you wouldn't find it noteworthy.
Didn't you imply in your last flame that human psychology wansn't science? See, I was under the impression that it was.
Human psychology is, to a large extent, not a science, no. Again, perhaps you should take some courses in philosophy of science.
Do you even know what your [sic] talking about? I highly doubt it.
Yes, I do. I have a M.S. in physical chemistry, and about one year left until I recive my PhD in physics.
Apart from that, yes I have studied courses both in psychology and philosophy of science. So, please tell me of your qualifications. Who are you to lecture me on science?
So who are you? Likely another Slashdot 14-year-old know-it-all.
Who are you to lecture me on science?
I never, in the above posts, lectured to you about science. Read them again, slowly.
Do you even know what your [sic] talking about? I highly doubt it.
I didn't correct your grammer and spelling mistakes. I'm sorry to see you sink to such a low.
So who are you? Likely another Slashdot 14-year-old know-it-all.
No, not a know-it-all. No, not 14. I am, however, a published author, a teacher, and an ordained minister. I hold a professorship at a local university. I lecture in two fields, computer science and theology. Mpore especially, I'm just a fellow who's defending myself -- after You obviously misinterpreted my post and felt the need to start a flame war.
While were still flaming -- I've noticed you like to jump to wild conclusions, make gross assumptions, and apply them to me. (oh, and BTW, psychology *is* a science.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm just a fellow who's defending myself
How righteous! If there is a flame war here, you are just as guilty as I am if not more.
You did not respond to your original post with any further elaboration, but with an arrogant "Read it again, Slowly.".
If you indeed are a teacher, you should know better than to respond like that. You should rephrase and elaborate on what it was you did supposedly mean.
In your post, you have only responded in flames yourself. I did make a several points in my former post adressing what was wrong with your statements. You chose not to replied to these, why?
What is and is not a science is not something strictly defined. If it was, there would not be need for a philosophy of science.
There are definitions of science (Popperian falsificationism for instance) under which signficant areas of psychology (most notably psychodynamics) do not qualify. There is considerable debate in the psychological community today about the scientific rigor of certain methods, theories and therapies.
And for one who prides himself on being a published author, it can hardly be out of place to remark on grammar and spelling.