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Optical Computer Made From Frozen Light
neutron_p writes "Scientists at Harvard University have shown how ultra-cold atoms can be used to freeze and control light to form the "core" - or central processing unit - of an optical computer. Optical computers would transport information ten times faster than traditional electronic devices, smashing the intrinsic speed limit of silicon technology. This new research could be a major breakthrough in the quest to create super-fast computers that use light instead of electrons to process information. Professor Lene Hau is one of the world's foremost authorities on "slow light". Her research group became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle."
Where do I get one of these? No, I want it now
Sigs cause cancer.
...you will void your warranty and may suffer a severe sunburn.
Most of the positive fanatics write lots of papers; those who think it's not going anywhere (like me) don't. There are sound physical reasons to be skeptical, in my mind:
1) Wavelengths are too big: 1 micron is now a large number, and optics doesn't work much smaller than this.
2) There are no good nonlinearities. Anyone can make a linear OR gate optically, but to function as an effective digital technology you need nonlinearity and level restoration. This is missing in pure optical systems, except at very high power levels. The high power levels imply low density. There are some optical gates which process data in "femtoseconds," but ask them how long it takes to get to the next gate. Maybe someday someone will invent a great, low power, fast, optically nonlinear material. Don't invest in it yet.
3) The serious workers are now mostly working in combined electronic/optical modes. The speeds here are limited by the gate speeds of the electronics, just like normal computers. You have to then ask if optics is a good (cost effective, space efficient, low power...) replacement for wire. Ultimately, the answer is probably yes, but there's an awful lot of work to do before that's true (for the distances of a few centimeters in high density computers, that is).
Iran captures three CIA agents
BTW, for those interested, here's a direct link to the "Light at Bicycle Speed ... and Slower Yet!" presentation - I was travelling about that speed in
my coldest car during a Colorado snowstorm.
Hope it doesn't melt
e=mc^2 except where c is like slower and fuck, headache.
Imagine trying to harness today's 3GHz CPUs with 1930s lab bench equipment. Digital electronics could have seemed another universe, out of reach in a universe of alternate physics "beyond radio". If photonic computation is within reach at artifically lowered speeds, we might be just about to cross the watershed, like going from transistor to ENIAC.
--
make install -not war
Her research group became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle."
Ah, so she worked on IE.
became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle.
ah yes, the Speed of a Bicycle (SoaB) metric for slow light.
------ How can making people laugh lead to bad karma?
The best thing about frozen light is that you can put it in your freezer, so that when there's a blackout, it will thaw and then you'll have light.
>to less than the speed of a bicycle.
So is that
1) A Bicycle with a jet engine strapped to it?
2) A Bicycle going up a hill with an 80 year old man on it?
3) A Bicycle being dropped off a building/cliff
4) A Bicycle being raced?
5) other?
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
I always knew that StopLights were a binary system, Green go,
Yellow go faster.
Never figured out that red one, maybe it's just a fancy case mod.
Freaky, someone I dated 10 years ago is stopping light, well her legs could stop traffic, so I guess she's taken it to the next level.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
crap... what kind of a cooling system will this require?
hm.. i wonder what frozen light looks like... well, i suppose you can't see it.
I can finally replace the broken isolinear chip in my time machine!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Freezing light? Soon we will be able to freeze electrical energy as well. I can't believe that.
And this means absolutely nothing to the non-supercomputer world. Light doesn't slow itself down for free. Freezing light for this proccess likely takes the expenditure equal to the GDP of a small country. At best, in the next 50 years there will be 2 frozen light optiocal supercomputers
Free MacMini
Scientists at Harvard University have shown how ultra-cold atoms can be used to freeze and control light to form the "core" - or central processing unit - of an optical computer. Optical computers would transport information ten times faster than traditional electronic devices, smashing the intrinsic speed limit of silicon technology.
Striking research and developments
News archive
This new research could be a major breakthrough in the quest to create super-fast computers that use light instead of electrons to process information. Professor Lene Hau is one of the world's foremost authorities on "slow light". Her research group became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle.
Using the same apparatus, which contains a cloud of ultra-cold sodium atoms, they have even managed to freeze light altogether. Professor Hau says this could have applications in memory storage for a future generation of optical computers.
But Professor Hau's most recent research addresses the issue of optical computers head-on. She has calculated that ultra-cold atoms known as Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) can be used to perform "controlled coherent processing" with light. In ordinary matter, the amplitude and phase of a light pulse would be smeared out, and any information content would be destroyed. Hau's work on slow light, however, has proved experimentally that these attributes can be preserved in a BEC. Such a device might one day become the CPU of an optical computer.
Traditional electronic computers are advancing ever closer to their theoretical limits for size and speed. Some scientists believe that optical computing will one day unleash a new revolution in smaller and faster computers.
Professor Lene Hau is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics & Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
Free MacMini
Bob: Mmmmm! This popsicle sure is good and tasty on a hot day like today.
Beth: OMG! That's no popsicle, that's our hard drive! You've just eaten all of my MP3s!
TDz.
I propose that "speed of a bicycle" be adopted as the standard measure of velocity in technical articles. Units already included in the standard are "Libraries of Congress" for data storage requirements and "Size of a Volkswagon" for physical size measurements.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of bicycles!
------ How can making people laugh lead to bad karma?
...the light freezes you!
Will it at least make and keep my vodka cold, comrade?
Now all we need is Advanced Military Algoritms and Pre-Sentient Algorithms until we achieve Fusion Power and our units become twice as strong as our enemy's units.
Intellectual Integrity and Cyberethics may pose a problem however.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
And we will all be overrun with Telecosmic cathedrals of light, blah, blah, blah...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Does this mean that I'll be able to go buy a lightsicle soon?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
... ten times faster than traditional electronic devices, smashing the intrinsic speed limit ...
With the rate that things are advancing, I can no longer classify 10x as 'smashing'. No, smashing is more on the order of 1000x.
On another note, put a decoder on one end of a 'bicyle-speed' light cable, and loop it back to an encoder on the other end... I wonder what sort of data-density you could achieve, with this 'dynamic ram' device?
I thought the speed of light was absolute? What am I missing here?
My ray tracer will rule! Bring on the free lunch.
http://nerdfortress.com/
I'll finally get that lightsaber I've been wanting?
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Obviously it's not simply a temperature thing, since most of space is absolute zero, and I can see stars and suns and stuff. So it's not freezing light as in freezing water.
So how exactly do you stop photons from moving? How does this affect relativity (e=mc^2)? How does this affect our perception of the universe - ie; if the light from the star that we think is 10,000 light years away is only moving 20mph or so, it could really be millions of light years away?
Does like, time slow down? My heads spinning. Freeze sounds like the wrong word.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The speed of light is _only_ 186,000 mi/sec when traveling through a vacuum. Light travels at slower speeds through all other mediums (i.e. earth's atmosphere, glass, a super-cooled diamond, etc)
What you reap is what you sow
at least we know we won't have to worry about cooling anything down in our computers. In fact, given the temps in those "frozen atoms" we may need heaters for the room in which that thing is sitting... Not to mention that you can't have any more plexiglas on your tower, or you'll probably lose all your processing power in tanning power!
Damn, geeks, you're out of luck...
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
This is the first Physorg article that I've seen listed in /. that actually provides an offsite link for the story! Are they getting mellow, or did they just make a mistake and will go back to their usual "tarpit" methods?
These reports about how an optical computer will be 10X faster than electrical computers are based on the observation that electricity travels at about warp 0.1 in typical semiconductors and assume that an optical computer will utilize photons traveling at warp 1. But if optical technology requires slowing photons down to the speed of a bicycle, my 30-year old HP-35 calculator will computer faster than an optical computer.
became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle.
My bicycle travels at the speed of light, you insensitive clod!
While this may not work (and I emphasize may, isn't it just a wee bit early to pronounce it impossible, implausible, or impractical?
Light and electricity travel at about the same speed. The only way to send information faster is to use more complicated modulation. You can use symbols that represent several bits (QAM) or some kind of frequency division multiplexing. In any event you are stuck with some kind of overhead.
As far as operations within a CPU go, I don't see any particular advantage for light over electricity in terms of speed of propagation.
Between chips, on the other hand, I think something like fiber may be the way to go. Designing high speed boards is a pain. Fiber doesn't suffer from a lot of things that electrical signals do. Moving data around on a board with an 'optical' layer makes a lot of sense.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of bicycles!
Don't they already do something like that in France?!
wasn't photon computing's purpose to use the speed of light to do computations? What use is to have light for the processing, if it's slower than the electrons we currently use?
And with all this freezer stuff, I doubt it'll have any practical use except for one or two super-secret govt computers that need millions of dollars in budget to do some crypto-crunching stuff.
You ahhhh dont believe this cold fusion mumbo jumbo do ya?
Is to shrink down those huge coolers to fit into this laptop, and now I will have to deal with freazing lap instead of burning. Shit.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Moore's http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/13/141622 4&tid=118&tid=126 revised law clearly states that technology should no longer continue to advance. This sort of thing will keep feeding technological expansion for years. Therefore, it is bogus.
We have learned a lot over the past decade or two. Much of what we have learned flies in the face of the established physics of old.
The speed of light is now known to be controllable. One major university laboratory recently was able to actually stop light from moving. That kind of blows the constant out of the water. Kind of makes the statement that I can't travel faster than the speed of light mute too. Einstien had it right though, it's all relative (in very simple terms). We also now know for a fact that instantanious travel is physically possible via quantum entanglement, across any distance. Proven in a lab. Even more hard to grasp concepts have even been proven recently, such as the concept of a single object existing in two different places at the same time. Also proven in a lab. All of these have corresponding articles on Slashdot and are easily tracked down, so I won't waste my time providing the links. The next couple of decades had ought to be pretty exciting for those that pursue new physics in these areas.
"The world is not what it seems, but is what it is. ~ Brian King"
I just patented the multicolored sugar infused frozen light devise.
It is the light saber you can lick.
-- my sig got
Who the fuck keeps modding this stupid crap up? Jesus, people, the reference has never been funny.
Well, it was coughing up blood last night...
So these guys aren't exaggerating?
No sig? Sigh...
And in other news, only old people in Korea use silicon semiconductors.
Does it run Linux?
Funny.
-- Boycott Shell
Ironically the problem with optical computers using this method is the same as that of silicon based systems - cooling!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You may hate it, but obviously people with mod points think it's funny! Suck it up...
From Wikipedia: 'In a sense, any light travelling through a medium other than a vacuum travels below c as a result of refraction. However, certain materials have an exceptionally high refractive index: in particular, the optical density of a Bose-Einstein condensate can be very high. In 1999, a team of scientists led by Lene Hau were able to slow the speed of a light beam to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001, they were able to momentarily stop a beam.' Slowing light down is nothing new, it happens every time light travels through a medium other than the vacuum of space. Atmosphere, glass window, diamond, etc. It just so happens that we can now create in a laboratory these BEC's, a so-called "superfluid" which is basically a substance cooled to the point where nearly every atom collapses to the lowest quantum state (like, close to absolute zero). This gives it some interesting properties, like zero viscosity and an extremely high optical density. Hope that helps.
6) A bicycle being ridden by a white guy with 1 testicle and a rock star girlfriend
The title of this post clearly reads:
Science: Optical Computer Made From Frozen Light
We don't even have a diagram for a logic gate (or at least none are presented in the article) just some supposition in the article that such a thing could be used as a component. As for the 10x faster, where the hell did this number come from? Even if Moore's Law is slowing down (don't nit pick about it be about the number of components on a chip) it will make this "smashing" 10x advantage moot. Perhaps they refer to the speed of light in free space as opposed to signal speed copper. But even this doesn't make sense because signal speed in copper is about c/3.
What really maters is how fast a gate can be made to switch, how easy it is to fabricate enough of them to do something useful, and how close you can pack them together. Until someone can put down on paper the diagram of how this thing would work it is pointless to posit that it would be 10x faster.
Usually for these Pie-in-the-Sky type hype offerings it is common to claim 100x or 1000x or 1,000,000x times.
That BSEs might be used someday as parts in a Quantum computer would be a completely different thing, and those calculations that could be done quantumly would be trillions of times faster, but only for very specific algorithms. This article is not talking about that possibility, but classical computing and I think they have a lot of work to do just to demonstrate a single working component. Let alone claim BSE computers are here or just around the corner.
Letter To Iran
most of space is very cold, yes... about 3 kelvin. not absoulute zero.
2)Really weird phyics like this doesn't start happening until things get really cold. Think tenths or hundredths of a degree above absolute zero. Of course, since energy and temperature are related concepts, at absolute zero, there is no energy, and nothing moves.
3)Relativity is still in effect. In fact it makes a lot of sense here. Less temperature = less energy (e). the speed of light (c) decreases at the same rate as the square root of e. At asbolute zero, e=0 c=0 m=infinity. Time has no meaning to light. Time only slows down/speeds up when your velocity changes with respect to the speed of light. If you were in the supercooled state, time would in fact slow down. The formula for time dialation is here: t'=t(1-(v^2/c^2))^1/2
4) At 1 Kelvin (still colder than space) everything works normally.
5)At ultracold tempearture, Einstein predicted that really funky things would happen. Matter as we think of it tends to break down. It's called the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Free MacMini
Light moves slower when passing through matter, speed limited by how much time the light is spending bouncing around, being absorbed, reabsorbed and emitted. In between the atoms, it is moving as fast as ever.
Talking about light "slowing" down is just referring to how long it is taking to cover the distance.
Maybe we can now shoot a beam of light a couple of feet, and then stop it. With new miniaturization technologies, they will come up with a high powered laser able to fit in a ergonomic device - such as THIS.
Imagine the uses for this technology!
Does this mean we can actually make phasers that produce slow photons so we can have cool special effects in real life like Star Wars and Star Trek? Then our super heros can dodge lasers.
I am sure this will be the next product on Think Geek.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
This research has been going on way before Harvard in Israel. Go to http://www.lenslet.com/index.asp
They use light for DSPs and have for 6 years. Check it out its a cool project
Fast microchips are all fine and dandy, but they're not going to satisfy my appetite for frozen light.
6) A bicycle hurled through space at nearly the speed of light?
Actually, most of space is about 3 degrees kelvin.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
There again she could be showing us smoke and mirrors. This is light after all. I'm still on the skeptical side.
Most of space is at 3K (due to the mysteriously rippled cosmic microwave background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang). The coldest places we know of in the universe are on earth (That doesn't change the fact that light normally travels through them at light speed)
It's things like this that enlighten me as to why there aren't more women in science.
Female Genius: "I have this theory that we can create super-fast computers by slowing down light!"
Old, Bald Male Faulty Head: "Stupid woman..."
D.
Most of space is also a vacuum. Where light runs into problems is when it has to go through extremely cold fluid.
Hopefully these ultra-cold atoms won't cost as much as those teeny-tiny atoms. Have you seen the price of those lately?
Pffft....Just use a flux capacitor.
We (Americans) have decided that from henceforth, the phrase "imperial units" will no longer be used as it slanderously implies that we are an empire. Instead, the correct phrase will now be "republican units". :P
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If you were in the supercooled state, time would in fact slow down.
Is this why being cryogencially frozen preserves you? or is that something else?
This explains why Superman's Fortress was in a cold, desolate place.
He needed the cold temps to get his optical computer running.
So if your computer has a "meltdown" when the power goes out and the fridge goes warm, do you have to buy a new CPU? Carry it home in a cooler full of dry ice from CompUSA?
Hmmm new Outlook virus turns off ACPI, melts thousands of CPUs.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Cryogenic freezing isn't even remotely cold compared to what physicists mean by supercooled. Cryogenics "works" by freezing things below the temperatures bacteria and other rotting agents can live.
Free MacMini
"became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle.
I'd like to see how she managed to get light to run in java
How is it faster to use light moving at the speed of a bicycle, then to use electricity? And if we can use light for processing, why not use it at it's fastest? I think the scientist just wanted to point out how they think they can freeze light. If they come up with a way to shine water, I'll be impressed, but only if it's done at the speed of a bicycle.
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-The Streets
African or European?
Real empty space (if such a thing exists) doesn't have a temperature. Temperature is about how much random kinetic energy something has, and nothing has no energy. (Actually wrong, because of virtual particles and the like, but let's just ignore this for now.)
To freeze light, you reduce the temperature of the medium it travels in. When this gets really, really cold, because of quantum uncertainty, the whole lot stops acting like normal atoms at all, but as a single, big ball of stuff, following a set of mathematical laws known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
A quick digression. How does light travel through the air? Photons and electromagnetic waves are only part of the action. Almost inevitably, a photon hits an atom of air in between. When this happens, it gets absorbed as energy, and this energy gets re-emitted as another photon. Due to the laws of physics, the probabilities are that the emmitted photon is like the original photon. So, measuring from the large scale, light seems to have been slowed down.
My understanding is that this is the same when you send light into the BEC, only that the entire BEC acts like an atom. Freezing light then, is to stop the BEC from re-emitting indefinitely, and just store the properties of the photon.
This has no effects on relativity. And it shouldn't affect our perception of the universe, because BECs are very fragile, and so probably rare.
Einstein showed there is no o bjective measure of speed. Of course, if a bicycle were to travel at the speed of light, it would be very heavy and very long, but, if you were the one riding it, you wouldn't notice...
Damn yakee website! :P
Scientists and other real people use the metric system.. you'll find the numbers will become more round and perfect.
Who the fuck keeps modding this stupid crap up?
Metamoderate. That way you're more likely to get moderation points. Then you can counteract the moderations that you find incorrect.
As an added bonus, you might get to metamoderate the comments you disagree with. (Such as the comment that your comment references)
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
If you were in the supercooled state, time would in fact slow down
So, time slows down in supercooled states b/c light slows down, increasing my velocity relative to light (I think this is what you said). At absolute zero, nothing moves, everything is traveling at the speed of light, time stands still. So, as the universe suffers heat death (assuming it does, of course), things get slower and slower as things get closer and closer to 0 Kelvin. But, without time, velocity has no meaning, so things getting slower (i.e., the dispersion of energy across the universe) means...
no more thinky, need beer.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Frozen Light slows you down
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
I was going to mod, but I guess a reply is better.
regarding point (3)-- "ess temperature = less energy (e). the speed of light (c) decreases at the same rate as the square root of e." I call shenanigans. c is a constant here to relate the conversion of mass to energy (and vice versa). E does NOT reference heat energy.
If it did, the speed of light would increase for hot objects (and on hot days). Time effects would be experienced by stars and nuclear reactors.
While it may not be redundant, it seems like a lame excuse to paste the article contents for a chance to get modded up.
You fail it. See... the light from your monitor had been slowed down to the speed of a bicycle. It took you a bit longer to see the article summary than the rest of us. Those precious few seconds cost you first post. Gotta suck. But that's science for you.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
1) Wavelengths are too big: 1 micron is now a large number, and optics doesn't work much smaller than this.
This poster is correct. Since I have a Ph.D. in the field and the parent obviously knows something about optics, I might as well respond to the parent's critics.
IR photons are BIG. Forcing light to bend around corners is difficult. A waveguide must have a very high index of refraction if it is to be used to bend light within a reasonable radius. To the extent a Bose-Einstein Condensate helps this problem is encouraging if you don't mind cooling your computer to 2 millikelvin.
The speed of these optical computers always seems to come down to limitations of the silicon processors that work in conjunction with the light.
It's just a Bose-Einstein Condensate. These projects take time. While we are enamored with this BEC project, some poor grad student is working on carbon doping. Higher doping might improve the world of electronics far more than another optical computer claim.
I visited Hau's website and did, though, enjoy her papers. I just don't think the press release accurately portrays the low engineering potential of this work.
that we can speed up light too?
Interesting stuff. Can you expand a bit on the use of the term "nonlinear" here? In the electrical sense, I understand that nonlinearity is what you want in a component that does multiplicative mixing, or heterodyning, of two or more signals. All it really implies, though, is that you can use one signal to switch another on and off, like a switched-mode mixer, right? A linear component would only add the two signals, while a nonlinear one can multiply them.
In the optical sense, though, what does that mean? Would a "nonlinear element" be any old AND gate? I'm kind of surprised that there aren't some easy hacks where a beam of light controls the polarization of another, perpendicular beam. That would count, right?
I don't care how, I want it NOOOOOoooooowwww
What in shitting-crikey are you on about? Do you know what is actually meant by 'slowing light down'? How exactly does this 'hint at moving backwards in time'?
Shitram Brown, PhD
Professor of Mathematics
If we can slow light to somehow make our "units" twice as long, we'll never get in a war again. Their women won't consider our lives expendable.
I remember back in the day when we used the SoaPF (Speed of a Penny Farthing) metric. It was pretty slow since we had to ride uphill both ways to and from the school house in the snow.
Using the same apparatus, which contains a cloud of ultra-cold sodium atoms, they have even managed to freeze light altogether. Professor Hau says this could have applications in memory storage for a future generation of optical computers.
I'll assume the store medium will need to be kept at this "ultra-cold" temperature for data to be safely stored. What if the cooling system fails (e.g. power failure, compressor failure, etc.). Or what if you don't have the resources to maintain this ultra-cold environment?
I think I'll stick to cheaper and more reliable store mediums like optical disks or solid state memory.
Just because anti-MS jokes are the flavour of the decade doesn't make the poster a troll, nor does it mean it's the opinion they actually hold. If you don't find lame anti-MS jokes funny, find another news site. HTH.
Well, that's kind of cool. But the real question is: Can they slow down time?
That isn't just an optical computer, that is where we live. Inside a frozen photon! Think about it. What does relativity tell us about the nature of the universe at the speed of light? It tells us that as we approach the speed of light, space and time compress. At the speed of light, they cease to exist! Google the twins paradox for more information. Essentially, this has been proven to be true with atomic clocks calibrated with each other, one on the ground and one aboard a plane traveling several times the speed of sound. Later when compared, they deviated precisely with what Einstein predicts in his equations, thus confirming Relativity.The twins paradox is a true property of our universe. Obviously light is a most transcendent property of the universe. Whereas everything else appears to slow and contract in relation to it, it alone remains constant. Nothing of mass can travel at C but light can. It has a unique perspective, if you can imagine it. It does not see a universe, indeed it sees nothing at all, thus how does it move? It does not, it rests as a single solitary photon. Like a frozen photon, a BEC, or Bose-Einstein Condensate. These are the exact properties of our universe! Gentlemen, I say to you, we exist within a Bose Einstein Condensate!!! Incidentally, they're saying Moore's law is dead or at least MIA. But all this, according to Ilya Prigogine coincides perfectly with the law of dissipative structures. Moore's Law is simply following a traditional bell curve. But from within it, scaffolding ever higher, comes the seeds of the next bell curve! In this case, it would appear optical computers are it...
it sounds fishy to me, too- if m became infinite as c approached 0, and these researchers have already managed to at least briefly stop light, wouldn't they would have created an object of infinite mass? wouldn't that create a black hole? shouldn't we all be sucked in by now? :)
Maybe I did say "blows the constant out of the water". Not quite what I meant. I apologize for typing words differently than I was thinking them. I should have said that what we have learned so far has certainly caused us to have to redress our theories of light and travel at speeds faster than 'light', simply stated. That was what I was attempting to point out with my poor choice of words.
Only REAL women can freeze light. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You realize the light is basically the fabric of space vibrating. To slow down light requires either distorting space, or slowing down time. (Time slows down in the presence of mass because mass bends space, forcing it to travel faster.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
As an expert on physics (a.k.a someone who read A Brief History Of Time and came away understanding only 10% of it, yet feeling smarter somehow) I thought light ALWAYS travelled at the speed of light?
If they've found a way to manipulate that, then perhaps sending produce back in time IS possible! Set the clock to 1980 and I've got a banana peel with Bill Gates name on it!
Moore's Law would have to get revised considerably upward for the last 25 years I think!Hmm imagine a cool-atom Nvidia chipset revving up Q3, baby. I want one too!!
Maybe not. Microsoft would develop "optimizations' for the new OS that would require 1MB per pixel for video rendering.
I currently own serveral optical PDA's that help me plan my day. Alas due to size and construction they are general not something you would be able to carry around but there are versions that cars use already.
:)
Its called a window, and depending on the level and toneality of light it emits means that trips outside become more plesant and as such not only is it a PDA but also very good for ones health and general stress levels.
I also have a portable optical computer, though this is used to aid in the correction of my long sighted vision. i have found both very reliable and with the best user interfaces one could ask for without any gui or other command line interface to learn. There just so intuative.
--
Thinking outside the box ever since I found out I have clostraphobia
--
Anyone got video of light going by a camera at bicycle speed?
stuff |
The Shiitakeum has the following new features:
* Four 1024-bit (1 kilobit) digital processing cores.
* Two 1024-photon (1 kilophoton) frozen light cores.
* Two 1024-qubit (1 kiloqubit) quantum computing cores.
* Four 1024-channel (1 kilochannel) analog computing cores.
* SingleAtom technology squeezes one thousand transistors into a single atom.
* The processing pipeline has been broken down into 299,792,458 discreet steps, enabling Intel to remove the internal clock altogether and run the digital portion of the processor at the speed of light. One "cycle" represents the absolute cosmic measure unit of time, and all operations occur in one cycle.
* 24,856 new instructions have been added since the previous model, bringing the new total to over 72 trillion instructions. This VCISC (very complex instruction set) is processed into a macrocode consisting of approximately 4 million instructions, which is further processed into a microcode consisting of of 1200 instructions.
* New instructions can be downloaded into the microcode or macrocode portion of the processor via design tools similar to old fashioned FPGA design tools. As a result, the entire UNIX operating system can be programmed in one instruction!
* RAM has been depreciated. 32 exabytes of internal general-use registers allow software to make more efficient data access, providing a more compelling Internet experience.
These are exciting times.
In 1999, a team of scientists led by Lene Hau were able to slow the speed of a light beam to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001, they were able to momentarily stop a beam.'
:o)
Pshaw! That's pathetic!
I've had a device for years that can stop a beam of light. It's called a curtain.
depends on what type of mass. if it's regular mass, then yes... if it's inertial mass than no.
In a sense, any light travelling through a medium other than a vacuum travels below c as a result of refraction.
Wait, if this is just refraction, then the light isn't slowed at all, right? The light might take longer to get wherever it is going, but that's just because it's taking the long way there instead of a straight line. Of course I could just be confused as to how refraction works.
Recently, the Hau group succeeded in reducing the light speed to 17 m/s (the speed of a racing bicycle).
"Once again, Light loses the Tour de France'
When I was reading Dr. Lau's homepage, I realized that her lab is performing the ultimate overclock: cool down atoms to the nanokelvin range in order to "freeze" light, allowing optical computers to be developed that can run faster than anything that can be accomplished in silicon.
A great hack.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
With all the effort spend on making room temperature superconductors, physics has focused on what's really important: Playing around with really really really cold stuff.
I have a dream, a dream that one day, I will not have a need for a hammer, for I will be able to freeze a banana with liquid nitrogen on tap, that I will be about to make liquid nitrogen ice cream whenever I want, that I will be able to use this liquid nitrogen to create liquid oxygen with which to light my charcoal grill in seconds.
God bless you physicists!
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Kudos to whoever is giving out low mod points to people whose jokes completely blow. I have seen "Funny,5" way too many times for observations that are just too painfully unfunny to read.
>In Soviet Russia, light freezes you!!
God, please stop.
Of course, since energy and temperature are related concepts, at absolute zero, there is no energy, and nothing moves.
Due to zero-point energy being nonzero, at absolute zero there is no "excess" energy.
lol, I spell checked it, and it said it was ok, so there (sticking out my tongue). You got me.
;)
Spookey ~ As in, "your wheels are very spookey".(?) As long as we are pointing fingers and toes at spelling mis-steaks.
I am indeed being very careful about my choice of words, but that is because it is difficult to separate meaning from words.
Regarding quantum entanglement, there are aspects of quantum entanglement that travel faster-than-light. However, as other posters have pointed out, these aspects do not permit information transference. Without information transference there can be no direction of casuality. This is very important when one realizes there is no such thing as instantaneous travel(in an absolute sense, at least).
Regarding instantaneous: as my previous qualification might suggest I will back-pedal on this a little. In any given reference frame, one can define simultaneous events as those from which a hypothetical photon eminating from both events would reach pass each other at a midpoint exactly between those two events in space (as defined for that reference frame). Instantaneous would have a similar definition. However, to someone traveling near the speed of light (relative to the first reference frame), they would have a vastly different idea about which events are simultaneous. They would see your two simulataneous events (which I will call A and B) such that A happened before B. (Assuming travel is not perpendicular to the axis containing A and B). Furthermore, someone traveling in the opposite direction would see that event B happened before A. Therefore if A had a causal impact on B (or vice-versa), one of these two new observers would claim that the causality ordering principle (COP) had been violated. I have very carefully chosen the words information and causal/causality here.
As for the shadow example, imagine this: Star A is 10 light-years away. Very large object B (which we will assume actually has no mass and so is not bending star A's light, but yet magically can occlude all light from A that falls on it) is 5 light-years away and is traveling at 0.75c perpendicularly to the line of sight. How fast would its shadow travel against a very, very large white screen? Simple geometry reveals that the answer is 1.5c. I don't think this qualifies as any kind of "trick". However, if one considers the situation carefully, it can be shown that no information from moving either the star A, nor the object B can travel faster than light!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
6) However fast Cowboy Neal can ride a bicycle. 7) In soviet russia, the Bicycle measures itself by YOU! 8) I ride a Unicycle, you Insensitive Clod!! C'mon, it has OPTIONS.. it counts as a poll... more or less.
"There is a reason Linux is free"
~me~
Hmmm... I wonder if you could overclock it by adding liquid cooling system?!
Just to add to what others have posted, I think it's worth pointing out that the use of "freezing light" is misleading. Slowing down light has nothing to do with making light "colder" (whatever that means). It doesn't even matter what the temperature of the medium is.
To slow down light, you need to run it through a material with a ridiculously high refractive index. When light goes through water (n = 1.3) it travels slightly slower than it does in vacuum (n = 1.0). So to make light go very slow, you need a material with a refractive index of millions or billions. No conventional material will give you this!
One way (the only way?) to produce a medium with such a refractive index is to generate a Bose-Einstein Condensate (hereafter BEC). This is a state of matter where all the constituent atoms are in the same quantum state, hence they are all in-phase, act as a single wavefunction, and do all kinds of wacky things. Among them is generating an apparent refractive index that is very high. The only way to make a BEC, in practice, is to cool matter to nearly absolute zero.
So it is a matter of engineering that they are using cold matter to slow down light. It isn't because the light is becoming cold or any other such nonsense. It's merely that this is the only way to generate a medium that has the desired optical properties.
Who knows, in some far-off future, we may figure out a way to generate BEC-like states at higher temperatures (for instance, the BEC state is related to the superconducting state for electrons in some materials)...
Can we please stop with the In Soviet Russia lines, it's really really really old.
Let me clear this up for all of those people that think "Full House" was a pretty funny TV show:
This Received a (Funny,4) - This is pretty funny.
I propose that "speed of a bicycle" be adopted as the standard measure of velocity in technical articles. Units already included in the standard are "Libraries of Congress" for data storage requirements and "Size of a Volkswagon" for physical size measurements.
This Received a (Funny,5) - This is damn unfunny.
The best thing about frozen light is that you can put it in your freezer, so that when there's a blackout, it will thaw and then you'll have light.
Many of the MetaModerators suck, plain and simple.
This is not Flamebait. I am just pointing out the obvious.
When will they slow it down to less than the speed of a ..... uhm .... freeeeezing turtle ?
So, what happens if you stick your finger in it?
For an excellent story dealing with this scientific topic, check out Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days".
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Is it just me? The entire discussion here is like the randomly generated paper thing.. :)
So should I hold off on building that AMD64 system I'm planning? I guess I'll wait 10 years for that optical AMD256.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
As my former Prof used to say (we did work on an alternative ultra-high-speed electronics) -- "One does not need light to get speed of light".
An EM wave propagates in a matched transmission line at the speed light would propagate in the same dielectric.
Make transmission lines superconductive, add a highly non-linear Josephson junction as a switching element and there you go. People have demostrated gates running at 770 GHz, logic running at 60G, it's all there, but not "basic research" enough to get Govt. funding anymore and might require more than 1-2 years that VCs are willing to wait to build a meaningful system.
Paul B.
As you say, there are no good low power nonlinearities. High power nonlinearities are easy to find -- the vacuum is nonlinear at high enough power levels. But I know of no optical nonlinearities which are functional at low -- or even modest -- power densities. This is important because it affects the packing density of the circuitry (see below).
The article uses a faulty metric -- the speed of propagation of signals is not the important criterion for designing a computer, but rather the delay in reaching the next gate. This depends as much or more on the density of the components (and the dimensionality of the construction technique) as it does on the speed. If components are spaced a foot apart, then it takes more than a nanosecond to reach them no matter what. While it is true that properly buffered CMOS on-chip wiring is only about 3% of the speed of light, the density (and required low power) of CMOS allows billions of gates to be reached in a nanosecond. Optical technology has a LONG WAY to go in reaching this point, let alone exceeding it. By then, 3-D silicon will make these numbers dramatically higher.
Also, superconducting on-chip interconnect will make on-chip silicon wiring dramatically faster (10x?) and is a much much easier technology that BEC.
But the physics is sure cool.
but they can't make a website that displays correctly. I tried with Firefox and IE, and in both the text displayed on top of other text and pictures. Don't they teach html at that "university"?
"Forcing light to bend around corners is difficult. A waveguide must have a very high index of refraction if it is to be used to bend light within a reasonable radius."
How about reflection instead of refraction? MEMs?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
2)Really weird phyics like this doesn't start happening until things get really cold. Think tenths or hundredths of a degree above absolute zero. Of course, since energy and temperature are related concepts, at absolute zero, there is no energy, and nothing moves.
That's not true. According to the laws of physics, a system cannot have an exactly energy (such as zero), it would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. There are random fluctuations in energy, even at 0 K. It's called zero-point energy.
Less temperature = less energy (e). the speed of light (c) decreases at the same rate as the square root of e. At asbolute zero, e=0 c=0 m=infinity. Time has no meaning to light. Time only slows down/speeds up when your velocity changes with respect to the speed of light. If you were in the supercooled state, time would in fact slow down.
This is complete nonsense. c is constant regardless of temperature/energy. Time does not slow down if you are cold. Your timeframe is slower when you are cold, as seen relative a warm state. Knowing the formula for time dilation and understanding it are two different thigns.
At ultracold tempearture, Einstein predicted that really funky things would happen. Matter as we think of it tends to break down. It's called the Bose-Einstein condensate.
That's not really true either. Most matter out there are not bosons and cannot form Bose-Einstein condensates. You can't make a BEC out of most molecules.
You should be modded troll for trying to get people pissed at you for karma whoring.
BTW, my Karma is already excellent, why would I need to Karma whore?
I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed that that's the way its normally done. From now on I shall, because, despite what you think, credit isn't my point, sharing information isFree MacMini
songs, libraries of congress, bicycles?!? I think we need to use some more standard mesuring units.
No smoking sigs indoors.
In the case of quantum entanglement, the change in "state" can not be used to convey information and hence has no causal characteristics. This is most definitely not nit-picking, as it is central to the resolution of the apparent EPR paradox.
I'll tackle the star example in a different reply (so as to start separating these!).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
As a layman here, wouldn't quantum computers completely trump any optical computer? Why not pile on with efforts on quantum computing if it's the ultimate solution?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Bose Einstein Condensate? Uhm, according to Wikipedia and other places, this takes place at temeratures below 2 kelvin, aka -271 degrees centigrade, 2 degrees above absolute zero. Would someone please tell me how it could possibly be efficient to cool anything down that far and still use it for computing? I think only hypothetical beings out in the Oort cloud (around 3k noonday temperature) would appreciate this.
Maybe a mainframe dipped in liquid helium would be financially justifiable for critical computing but I don't see Intel or IBM using this in tomorrow's PC or Mac.
I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed that that's the way its normally done. From now on I shall, because, despite what you think, credit isn't my point, sharing information is
Misinformation, more like it, judging from your posts in this thread.
As for the star theory, the massless, but very large body was a prop used so that I could arrive at a very simple answer without having to incorporate GR, etc. One could still construct such apparent FTL travel of a shadow even with body that has mass, but it is somewhat more difficult. An easy explanation, indeed (as you point out), is that it is the absence of light that is moving FTL and not anything with physicality. Additionally, it was exactly my point that this was not a violation of any known laws, but merely an amusing example of something (i.e., the shadow) that is traveling FTL. All such somethings that can travel FTL can have no causal effect and in that sense have no real physicality (if that is even a word).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
There is a nice overview/tutorial on how the process of slowing light works here:
a rd_files/v3_document.htm
http://qis.ucalgary.ca/quantech/storage.html
Dr. Hau also has a powerpoint presentation on how it works as well:
http://www.deas.harvard.edu/haulab/101204%20stand
make 'em on the cheap. It would suck to have your CPU melt down any time the power went out.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Optical computers would transport information ten times faster than traditional electronic devices
That's simply not true. In "traditional electronic devices" signals travel faster than just 1/10 the speed of light (I think it's around 60%), so there's no way anything can transport information 10 times faster (unless they claim to go faster than light).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
to bicycle speed!!
sure... it'll take a little while, but it'll happen...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
There is now significant research, both experimental and theoretical showing photonic crystal waveguides can guide light with near perfect transmission around 90 degree bends. These photonic crystals can be written using Silicon on insulator techniques, and so ar ecompatible with the efforts of Intel et. al.
...were a bit of a puzzler in the previous experiments, where the speed reduction hadn't been so pronounced.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
To have a temperature, you need molecules. Space itself has no temperature, its the things in space that do.
I don't get it.
On Prof. Hau's site is this interesting statement: "We also have experiments on cold atom and carbon nanotube interactions and on surface-enhanced Raman scattering of biomolecules". Raman scattering of biomolecules? Hmmm, sounds like a noodleicious research topic to me. Is this the oily film on the surface of the water in the empty bowl in the sink?
We still need to get the processors processing a light speed to keep up with the bus speeds,or else the espense for the return willl be fairly marginal. IzzyP http://lakesidemax.com/
Light is a fluid if it can be frozen and conducts electricity! This is interesting. If Light can be slowed to a crawl in a Earth refigerator, wouldn't that mean in the Deep Freeze we call Outer Space that's it's already going slower EVERYWHERE? This would mean that Light Speed is only 186,000 on Earth... That Light Speed is really slower than electricity. That my brain is working faster than the Speed of Light. And that THEN we run into a whole host of conclusions: http://www.newpath4.com/formulaeperpetual_perpetua ltimeperpetualspaceperpetualpowerperpetualmomentum perpetualmotion_3plus4equals5.gif & http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm .
The definitions are all being sucked into a Black Hole: http://www.newpath4.com/anwar_drillitfastdrillitgo odforgetaboutthneighborhood_anwar.htm .
Heck, with the Speed of Light now in question it means there's a very real possibility I'm completely right and the REST OF YOU ARE ALL COMPLETELY WRONG. hehehehehehehehehe
This has been another post by Woodrow Riley, who never claimed to be another Einstein but may be anyway.
Why using slow light?
I want my optical computer to be fast!
I think there are a great number of people working the the quantum 'computing' arena who would disagree with you on that one. I am not even going to attempt to argue the finer points of how information is handled on that level, as it would involve indepth explanations that would be better hashed out in a different setting than this. I do however understand the basis of your supposition that information cannot be 'transfered' quantumly. I believe that it is much too early in our understanding of the material to make such a judgement. I think that with what we know now, that we cannot transfer information at a distance. I do believe that we can make computations on a local level quantumly however and there is a lot of promise in that area. That in itself represents the transference of information, although a bit skewed from the initial point I as attempting to make.
Overall, I think we are all going to find out that some of the long standing ideas we had/have about the physical nature of our surroundings are going to have to change a bit. There simply is too many 'apparently' contradictory things out there that already do not fit into our current models of the 'the way things should be'. It is an exciting time to be involved in the physical sciences. I envy your position as it lends itself to have greater access to those discoveries and initial theories than the general populace. Kudos with regard to your achievements and I thank you personally for participating in an open forum such as this. Your views and your depth of knowledge are refreshing to see here.
First of all, I agree that quantum computing is a very complex field. However, I think you miscontrue my assertion that the "state" that is transferred in the EPR paradox does not transfer information (between photons) with a broader (and demonstrably false) assertion that quantum states in general do not contain information. I cannot state that I know with absolute certainty that EPR states do not transfer information between photons, but I do believe this to be the case because I have faith in the causality ordering principle (COP), and because others who know much more than I do have shown how every possible way conceived of so far to transfer information from one EPR photon to another fails.
Secondly, I agree that some of the long standing ideas we have about the physical nature of our surroundings are going to have to change a bit. The fact that QM and GR don't agree with each other makes that point very clear. One (or most likely both) of these theories must be wrong. I'd like to believe that whatever replaces these theories (e.g., M-theory) will make more intuitive sense than QM, but something tells me that it's going to make QM seem very rational indeed.
Finally, notice that my last name is Hocking, not Hawking :), so I'm not sure who you think I am, but I don't think that I am who you think I am. On your previous post you mentioned my students (which having been both a public high school teacher and a TA I have had, but I suspect you're thinking something differnt), and on this post you mention "[my] position" and "[my] achievements". My position is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science studying neural network simulations of the hippocampus, and my achievements in the public domain are not at all extensive. (I also have an M.S. in Physics/Astronomy in case you're wondering where some of my physics knowledge comes from.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?