Slashdot Mirror
IBM Slows the Speed of Light
dptalia writes "According to an article on ZDNet, IBM has come up with a way to slow light to 1/300 of its normal speed. While this has been done in laboratories before, IBM has found out how to do this using standard materials, which opens the possibility of mass production. This means that the dream of having optical based CPUs may be closer than previously thought." From the article: "When the optical conversion might start to occur is a matter of speculation. Luxtera has said it will start to commercially produce products in 2007. The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers. A paper providing details on the chip will run in Nature on Wednesday."
speed is just related to distance and energy
But by the time they actually get it out on the market, computers will be able to handle at least 1/150th the speed of light (assuming the 18mo/2x theory holds). Interesting stuff.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
This is not new, my city has been slowing down light for years, particularly red lights they can't seem to apply the same technology to yellow or green lights though.
Research Paper Title:
How to Slow the Speed of Light Using Common Household Items.
I read
I'm waiting for the day when we can raise the speed of light so we can go faster. Futurama predicted it'd be in 2508, but I'm hoping we get there sooner.
That is the best-written synopsis I have seen in a while. And posted by ZONK no less!
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
"A paper providing details on the chip will run in Nature on Wednesday".
Anyone have a link to this considering that it is Thursday?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I have to change the speed of light from a const to a variable now?
Millions of teenagers will love it if light gets slowed that much. It could give them time to zip up their pants when their mom walks in the room wondering what she heard coming from the computer.
I bet they are slowing it down to leave room for overclocking! :P
gtkaml.org
Slow down the speed of a Steve Ballmer-thrown chair.
The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers.
It is all just a matter of compatibility. If one company manages to make an optical Hard Disk which interface is the same SATA or IDE, and which is affordable of course, then it will surely be a great replacement for the current slow disks.
The same goes for RAM, or motherboards. As long as they continue providing the same connecting interfaces (and are backwards compatible) they wont have any problem getting into the market.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Well... I guess this is one way to achieve faster than light travel. Guess it's easyer to just use the old car but slow everything else down. ;)
Can somebody please give me a useful application for this?
Generally, in computer chips, the hard part is speeding them up. Slowing things down is easy. What does this new tech buy us?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I'd rather they figure out how to speed up switching. You wouldn't need to slow light down then.
TANSTAAFL
IBM? Hrm. I'm a little surprised -- who else would've expected Microsoft to be the industry leader in making things go slower?
I'm looking for an optical processor that can do math at point 5 lightspeed. I expect this will be of particular assistance in my thesis project of calculating how fast a certain type of falcon can run. In the past, when trying to figure this out, I've had to hold the bird with a pair of grippers that would keep slipping out of my hands, and by the time I'd be done, I would have gone through maybe nine or ten pairs.
With a faster processor, I hope to do the Kestrel run in less than 12 forceps.
This is interesting. So an optical computer's speed will be limited by the electronic components. That means there would have be some sort of "light buffer" so that the electronics can keep up? Or is the goal is to slow down light enough that a buffer is unnecessary? Or, hopelfully, the electronics can be sped up to meet the optical components part-way.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
The speed of light sure ain't what it used to be.
First IBM starts offering Solaris as an OS choice. Now they've slowed the speed of light.
Who else is waiting for a skinny guy on a pale horse to ride across the sky?
I wonder if we can make chips that modulate light, and therefore the info encoded in its state in time by slowing/speeding it depending upon whether or not other light is either present or due to other light's speed. Rather than transistors which modulate electron current by stopping/permitting it depending upon whether or not other electron current is present.
--
make install -not war
Alright, so how exactly does slower light translate into faster computing?
Check the "Information wants to burn it's bra" networks, aka P2P.
The bad news is that the speed of light is now roughly 18 miles per hour.
I wonder if this would help advance any photon-based quantum computer implementations. Any thoughts ?
I thought it only took me 30 minutes to get to work, but when I arrived they said I was two hours late!!
Quit playing around with the physical constants IBM!!
The real question is whether an optical chip could be programmed like a normal chip, or we would all have to learn 2 or 3 new architectures when everyone comes out with optical chips.
Every Pratchett fan knows that light slows down if you apply a strong Magical field...
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it's wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
- Reaper Man
IBM has actually found two more ways to slow the speed of light:
Subject photons to their software development process.
Put photons through the government procurement process.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Harvard scientists slow down light to 38 mph Just create a bose-einstein condensate and fire a laser through it. Pretty simple if you ask me.
Now IBM can run at 1/300 speed of light for the "normal" mode and at the speed of light for the "turbo" mode!
Now if only they could slow their stockholder's losses, they'd be in business.
countdown to the "Speed of light performance myths", "temporal over clocking", and bootleg computer makers using the lightbulbs from easy bake ovens as processors.
See, the computer industry has already slowed down, so now they're slowing down light to catch up with where the industry has already gone.
One thing for certain, this sure makes building my FTL drive a whole lot easier!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If I'm using light in a CPU, why do I want to slow it down? Is there some reason why I really want to decrease bandwidth and/or increase latency?
...for the SI meter standard.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Dang, now my malformed, multi-threaded application will consume all system resources in 1/2 time. How am I going to get any work done? Tell me that.
Cogito Ergo Sum
I mean, if I get an optical processor, I don't want it to run at 1/300th the speed of light. I want FULL speed. Are they planning on selling 1/200th as an upgrade, until one day we top off at 1/1th the speed of light like we have at around 3.8GHz?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I can now do that computation in 12 parsecs.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The higher the dispersion, the lower the practical bandwidth of the device.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Does this affect the speed of dark?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It doesn't seem like the speed of light is really being "slowed down." Rather, the time it takes photons to travel a certain distance is being increased by the use of a device which scatters photons and also by means of electric fields. This is just like saying that light travels "more slowly" through certain media. Really, what I think is happening is that there is a delay when a photon is being absorbed into a certain medium before being able to pass through it. So, it seems that light slows down, but really the delay is caused by the interference of the medium and the speed of the actual photons is constant.
Unicorns and other 'mythical' creatures are almost sure to be 'created' via genetic engineering sooner or later. The potential revenue for mythological (vs. jurassic) park is too great and the ethical considerations pose no real roadblock, cloning and genetic alteration of various animals having already been accepted in many nations of the world.
A faster than light unicorn, though--now that would really turn heads.
Furthermore, I for one welcome our new FTL Unicorn overlords.
The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture.
Huh? The computer industry, and more specifically, the processor industry, is the fastest adopter of new technology in any endeavor in human history. Anyone have an example of a faster-moving industry?
Trade you your SSN for a login. After all if their information is worth so little as to pay for it (even as a newsstand copy). Then yours isn't worth any better.
The wavelength of an electron is extremely tiny compared to the wavelength of light. This means that feature sizes for light based chips are necessarily much larger than those for electron based chips. Barring some advancement that allows us to pack more functionality per unit area into an optical chip, optical computing will remain a very niche field.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
"Standard materials" like what....water? The speed of light is only constant in a vacuum, and it slows when passing through all sorts of media (like water). Slowing down light is nothing new...
The metre (NOT meter, please...this is the systeme internationale des unites des poids et mesures we're talking about here, whose name can't even be spelled out correctly on Slashdot I find) is defined in terms of speed of light IN VACUO. No problem. Last I heard, IBM hadn't been using vacuum tubes in quite a while.
Pining for the fjords
Now if we could just figure out how to turn this into some sort of weapon...
Proverbs 21:19
If this can be done using "standard materials", as the article mentions, one wonders if our calculated estimates of distance to stars could be off, considering all the unknowns outside the solar system. I imagine that even if there is a small modification to the speed of light coming from stars, our estimation of distance from stars and other celestial bodies (and likewise, our estimation of how long the star has been shining in order to reach our eyes on earth) would be greatly affected.
In other words, if there are natural materials that can speed up or slow down the speed of light, then we can only judge star distance with the asterisk of "provided the speed of light from the source to the destination remains constant".
Interesting stuff anyways.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Relatively speaking.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
The latest Nature podcast has an interview with one of the researchers working on this: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html
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Wait!
Is this some kind of elaborate ploy to show Darl that although he thinks that the Sun may well shine out of his backside, its only 300 times the speed he thought it was?
Therefore, carrying the same hypothesis forward, the (less than) 300 infringeing items of code IBM allegedly contributed towards Linux may also infact be reduced by a factor of 300?
Now, if only we could figure out how to speed up light, everything would be great.
I can do better: I have the technology to totally stop the speed of light!
I call it a wall.
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
now can they speed up the pace of the workday?
Merlin
As the industry moves over to optical logic, what will that mean for current electrical engineers who have until now been focused solely/primarily on electronic logic with semiconductor devices? Will there still be a place for conventional electronics in the "optical age" or will we all be looking for new jobs, regretting our past career decisions?
"The light is coupled to the photonic crystal waveguide through a polymer-based fibre coupler and single-mode access strip waveguide butt-coupled to the photonic crystal" I could definitely do this at home. Thank god for butt-coupling.
Where are all the java jokes?
Everyone knows that information travels at the speed of light through the Internet. The mecanism known as the slashdotting effect, named after the Slashdot laboratory, has been known and used for years to slow down the flow of information. It achieves much better results than 1/300 th of the speed, sometimes eventually completely stopping the flow.
Completely unaffected by the IBM press release, the head of the Slashdot Research department, Mr CmdrTaco, let a laconic note on his blog: "been there, done that. Take that IBM!". IBM officials couldn't be reached for comments.
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
Man I'm glad I didn't sell-out to that damn metric system!
-- Probability does not dismiss possibility --
Call me when they alter the gravitational constant.
Worst pun ever .
Best Slashdot Co
this is not my idea, but on this blog http://www.easyliving.org/dale/blog/?p=12 this author talks of using some mechanism to slow down light so much that it can be used later. Are we there yet ;-)
This should confuse a few people. Group velocity (the apparent speed of a collection of waves - aka wave packet) can go faster than the phase velocity (the speed of a given wave making up a wave-packet).
Physicsweb
American Institute of Physics
Sure as hell confuses me.
\begin{rant}
Then they start talking about amplification in optic fibres, but the zero of intensity at the start of a pulse can't go faster than 299792458m/s so it can't carry information (and other such misleading things)...
\end{rant}
So now all those intergalactic civilizations are going to get pissed off at earth, because IBM screwed around with the speed of light and messed up warp drives throughout the universe.
I just have one question: Was it worth it?
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
"Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers."
Don't know if anyone covered this...
Already said here: no matter can reach the speed of light in this dimension without the onset of infinite density/mass... meaning, a pen cannot speed up to the speed of light EVER no matter how much energy was put into it, PERIOD.
Now, I don't know if this has been said or not; "matter" (used losely) already traveling the speed of light can accelerate (I havn't figured out the next ceiling yet...) only under one condition, the gravitational pull in from of the direction the light is headed is increased, light does have a mass, therefore, all objects in the universe with a mass have a gravitational pull, and all objects with a mass can be pulled by gravities effects, speeding up light past 'E'.
The salesman at the computer store said my new cup holder has photons instead of electrodes. So if I spill my coffee I won't get a shock.
Ridiculous comments aside, the speed of light really *is* a constant. I remember wheedling a science teacher for this information long ago. Light *appears* to go more slowly when it passes through a dense medium because the photons are absorbed and then reemitted, which takes an amount of time. Naturally, the more often photons are absorbed, the slower the photons move *on average*. Really though, whenever they're moving, they're moving at c.
Nothing new , thats what we idiots call ghost activity . But IBM engineers are smart. They are already planning few 'light trap ' amusement parks which will store/release all kinds of light including red.
wake me up when they've made it 300 times FASTER!
sleeeeeppyyyy...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
The Plane_arium. ;-)
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
We want optical computers because light is fast. Now we slow light down. So doesn't that just defeat the whole exercise?
I guess there's going to be a lot of overclocking.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"What if Einstein is wrong? I'm sure he'd agree that we should at least try to prove him wrong than just accepting his word as truth."
Funny how "wrong" we want science to be when it keeps us from doing what we want (FTL). But how "right" it is when we want to keep others "creationists" from doing what they want.
Oh, science you fickle "copyright is good" bitch.
From comp.parallel FAQ:
"Some vice presidents of IBM assert that the speed of light goes just
a little bit faster in Armonk." --An IBM Vice President [yes, it's humor]
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
which is science. Blind postulates are not.
1) Burn it to a CD.
After that you can-
2) Copyright it so no one else can enjoy it and get the *AA to do the dirty work for you.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
That'll slow'em down.
I guess this also means the tollbooth trick didn't work the way it did in Rock Ridge...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
IBM, Moving at the speed of dark.
Are they slowing it down to 1/300 so that they can release subsequent "faster" optical CPU's in the future?
Seems like it would be much more impressive to increase the speed of light than reduce it
Also I thought the speed of "electricity" and light was pretty close. If so how is an optical computer that is 1/300 the speed of it's electric based one "faster"?
--
Q
Obligatory Dilbert quote, from the 2005 calendar (Oct 19).
Dilbert (handing his assignment to the garbage man): Does my latest assignment look impossible?
Garbage man: Let's see... You'd need to slow the speed of light, and perfect the art of human cloning...
Dilbert: So there's hope?
Garbage man: Eliminate gravity, stop the Sun, re-animate the dead...
(insert joke here about driving slow in the fast lane)
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Those of us who think in 4 dimensions know they didn't slow anything down, just changed its direction. They only slowed the speed of the 3-dimensional shadow of light.
If light slows down when you pass it through a mass, what happens when you pass it through some negative mass? Should speed up if you ask me!
That was an AMAZINGLY bad pun.
First one I've seen to rival the old chestnut "So, a termite walks into a bar. He asks 'Is the bar tender here?'"
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
So that's what they meant by OS/2 *Warp*!
.... couldn't resist. ;P
Sorry
RFC2119
Unfortunately, this article has nothing to do with Einstein, so the considerable pile of lame jokes above are all misplaced. The item title was a bit misleading, and even the ZDNet article is a bit misleading on this point. As has been mentioned, light often slows down in all sorts of ways in nature when light passes through water, transparent objects, Earth's atmosphere, etc. The immutable speed of light Einstein was talking about was the speed light *in a perfect vacuum*. In our everyday word, such conditions are extremely rare. So basically all the light you've ever been exposed to is "slow".
So IBM slowing the speed of light is *not* what is noteworthy here. What *is* noteworthy is that they slowed light down to a very, very tiny fraction of even it's normal everyday-on-earth speeds using relatively cheap materials. So according to the article, this super-slowed light opens the door for these light-based technologies to actually be developed in the near future instead of the not-so-near future. Apparently, high-speed light is so difficult to use as to be impractical for such purposes, so the very slow light is indeed a breakthrough -- but not in the way that most of you yuksters may have thought.
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Does that mean it will now be easier for me to go back in time?
Blender And Linux Fan
"Some vice presidents of IBM assert that the speed of light goes just a little bit faster in Armonk." --An IBM Vice President [yes, it's humor]
:)
Yep because every IBMer that's not in Armonk knows that the speed of light slows down as it heads towards Armonk (like everything else). However the light is brighter in Armonk because it's closer to heaven
Why slow it down when you could just have longer signal lengths. This potentialy has the posibility of becoming the qwerty keyboard equivelant to the light bus.
:).
That aside I long dream of building a PC HIFI stylee with light/fiber interconnects semi lego stylee. Add another memory brick/CPU. But ideals aside its still a remarkable achivement. Potentialy usualy for memory if you could slow it down and have a long enough bit of fiber you could potentialy use the fibre to store data as slowed down light. Which would be more than fast enough for todays CPU bottleneck issues.
L0- cache light memory anybody
There's a so-called project manager that keeps sending me 4 page emails asking 30 questions, the answers to most of which are obvious if he thought as much as he typed.
It may be highly relative (ahem) to my own space/time continuum, but I'd say that counts as negative energy for me!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Laboratories have had the jump on IBM for a good long while, it seems, seeing as how they've managed to stop light, not just slow it down- I'll be really amazed when they can make it stop with "Standard Materials"
IBM can manipulate the speed of light, but they can't give apple a 3GHz G5? Does anybody else find this funny?
Could controled dispersion (if possible) be used as a method for pseudo-quantum computing?
Random Rants from an Airline Employee
Imagine jewelry with diamond like stones with a refractive index of 300 (diamonds have a refractive index of 2.78 iirc, so this is roughly 100 times higher).
Also, this might have implications for other areas as well.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I hope the paper itself doesn't say "slows down light." You cannot slow down light!!! Photons always travel at 3*10^8 m/s!! Its only the apparent velocity that slows down in magnitude...the photons still travel at c between obstacles. This might be obvious to informed readers of this forum, but it can be misleading for the layman -- and once a notion is out there...people would start thinking photons have really been slowed down. Not acceptable!
We can all listen to a not-aging-so-fast Sammy Hagar sing "I can't drive 299792.458 km/s !"
Well before we convert to your optical CPUs, I might wanna see this in Massproduction! Why havn't I heard of this anymore?
It might be a little offtopic, but seriously what does all this innovation do, if noone is making products from it?
So how does slowing down the light make it more interesting for building Computerparts? Well this might be a question for the scientists at IBM. They might face this question every day. Why not give more specific answeres? Anyhow the only really interesting question might be: When can I have a Beowulf-Cluster of these?
Am I the only one who misread that?
Cool, it can be a segment on Secrets of the Universe! Sounds like the pefect follow-up to creating plutonium.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
No no no, you've got it all wrong. They were travelling at "Ludicrous Speed", which as we all know, is the next realm faster than "Ridiculous Speed", which itself is faster than light speed.
They weren't travelling at plaid speed, but as a result of travelling at ludicrous speed they "Went to Plaid", which is of course the inevitable intangible result of bending space-time to handle such anti-Einsteinian modes of travel. That's also how they were able to watch Spaceballs the Movie during the filming of said movie. Ludicrous speed dynamics also govern on when 'then' will become 'now', which we know the the answer to be 'soon'.
make world, not war
"What do you propose that Christians will acheive by proving creationsism is correct? What will change? What will they receive as a benefit. Will our economy improve? Will our computers run faster? Will we live longer, healthier lives? Will world peace happen?*
Nope. Nothing will change."
With THAT attitude it will not.
Lets see:
Beliving in a God.
Faith, Hope, Charity, Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, Temperance, Humility, Kindness, Abstinence, Chastity, Patience, Liberality, Diligence, Courage, Valor, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty. All qualities no amount of science will bring back. But all in short supply in a world that claims there's no God.
With your choice:
Speed! Speed! Speed!.
Well we certainly can see which one will improve the human condition.
*And since you brought it up, may I point out that science despite all it's works has never achieved world peace, and just adding more works to it's ledger isn't going to change that.
when light slows down, does it allso slow down reality, or only our perception of it. and if its the former, can we then travel faster by speeding it up?
while i dont think we can travel backwards in time, i have a feel that we may at one time be able to control spheres of local time. basicly areas where time moves faster or slower. being inside one that have a slower then normal time would make the outside look like a movie on fast forward. being inside one thats have faster time may make you able to dodge a bullet thats fired from the outside (you will see what path it will take long before it enters the area if its small enough) but may affect your rate of ageing...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Here's the IBM press release (w/ pics) (check out the animation from that page)
Here's a whole page of pics (red, yellow and blue - sorry, no green)
Here's the project page from the researchers
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
Several components will have to be developed before photos can replace electrons inside computers.
Microsoft didn't come up with this one, or we'd end up paying for new versions light every three years to make it go slower.
Having worked with them on several proposals, they could slow down anything, so it's no surprise that even the speed of light was no obstacle for them.
God bless their customers.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
Required reading for internet skeptics
I remember reading the SF story by Rober Shaw, "Light of Other Days". In it he postulated that glass would be created with Bose-Einstein condensates. Here's a web page that talks about it and has a link to the story. Slow Glass It's not the same technique that IBM is using but still interesting. Rob:-]
Please sir, a link?
Haha, I thought you said blind prostitutes are not.
While we call this 'slowing down light', is that actually what's happening? Or are they just making it bounce around a whole lot so that it gets to the end of the tunnel later?
I mean, if we send one beam of light to a point 1 metre away, and another is bounced off the moon and then back to the same point 1 metre away, the second beam arrives at said point later. We can't say we slowed the second beam down because it arrived later.
The speed of light is 186,252 miles per second, +/- whatever. 1/300 of that in miles per hour is just under 2.25 million. So that's still pretty fast.
This sig no verb.
Colossal Storage Years ago Patented a reprogrammable function in which negative and positive refraction can occur changing the index of refraction.
I would much prefer to be able to change the internal geometry thru intelligent programmability then just drilling a bunch of holes in a piece of material.
here is Colossal's webpage.
http://colossalstorage.net/
I hope that this doesn't make the next couple of generations of coders sloppy ones because they have immense resources at their disposal.