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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."
Actually no... Most of the time the light would still be operating on the good old light speed. But for it to work in computers you still would have to slow it down in places and even stop it. For example to let another beam of light to pass before it can go through.
Another practical use of using light would be the possibility of smaller size and less energy usage.
We have optical hard disks, and they are a hella of a lot slower than magnetic ones. The optics we're talking about here are for moving the signal around the machine (and over the network) after it's been read from the media.
My guess is that there are still some nasty snags awaiting even making a serious optical router, much less producing it commercially. I'm betting more on 2012 than 2007. Hell, even LongVista won't be out by 2007.
I know you're giving a serious response to a joke, but it makes me come up with an even further off the wall, but still serious, response...
Which vacuum?
In physics, there seems to be the possiblility of other vacuum states than the one we happen to have in our observed Universe. Since this is Slashdot, it's worth mentioning that science fiction has at least 2 books where the concept of alternate vacuum states plays a plot-driving role, "Schild's Ladder" by Greg Egan and "The Forever Peace" by Joe Haldeman.
But I wonder what the value of C would be in these alternative vacuum states...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
As I understand it, traveling through a non-vacuum medium doesn't slow down the true speed of light. The light just bounces around a bit on it's way to the destination. The reason it takes the light longer to get from point A to Point B is that it actually covers more ground. Think of it as taking the scenic route.