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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."
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/
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.
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."
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.
but yes, there's a link. Your full-text access may vary.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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?
The light will go into ultra-violet and possibly plaid!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
The bad news is that the speed of light is now roughly 18 miles per hour.
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.
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"?
Now IBM can run at 1/300 speed of light for the "normal" mode and at the speed of light for the "turbo" mode!
countdown to the "Speed of light performance myths", "temporal over clocking", and bootleg computer makers using the lightbulbs from easy bake ovens as processors.
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?
I have been wondering why I don't seem to be ageing as fast, these past months. Now, Slashdot informs me that IBM has slowed down the speed of light, and this is all beginning to make sense!
That "time is relative" comment. Boy! Truer words were never said. Waiting for the next slashdot story - the hours go by like minutes, as I hit F-5, over and over again! Then, when called into my manager's office - to discuss my productivity "problem" - just the opposite.
Just wonderin'. Do all you guys like cheese?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The higher the dispersion, the lower the practical bandwidth of the device.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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.
The latest Nature podcast has an interview with one of the researchers working on this: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html
A paper providing details on the chip will run in Nature on Wednesday
I was thinking nevermind how the new chips run in nature, I want to know how well they'll run locked up in my server room.
Chips of the wild! Coming soon to a safari near you!
I wrote an article for today's Wired News on IBM's discovery (along with another recent photonics discovery from Stanford) and asked a number of scientists whether this "slow light" chip might have applications for quantum computing. The sense I got was that, generally, slow light may indeed come in handy for a photon-based quantum computing system. But since it's a room-temperature, silicon-based chip (read: LOTS of quantum noise), it doesn't seem likely that this particular slow light environment would be qubit-friendly.
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.
Generally, the speed of light is used only for "close" objects. For objects outside of the solar system, other properties are used including parallax, spectral type, and luminosity. None of these properties depend on the speed of light. Here is an informative link on methods used at various distance scales.
In the same way that Jesse Owens with a twisted ankle is faster than Fat Albert.
It is not that light is "really" made out of some particles called "photons", you can look at it as a wave phenomenon as well. Neither Newton nor Huygens were right about the nature of light. Just reducing light to a bunch of particles is a simplification. It's not, that your explanation is wrong, one is just not forced to choose the particle picture. And if you look at it as a wave and measure its group velocity, you can call it the speed of light. If you are in a situation where you could be misunderstood, you may add "in (a specific) medium". What is constant is the speed of light in vacuum.
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.
which is science. Blind postulates are not.
No, it's just a standard measurement, it uses the constant c, which is the speed of light in a vacuum. It doesn't matter if the light moves faster or slower between the two objects, the distance remains constant.
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.
I don't quite see where you're getting this idea from. It's a bit barmy to imagine current electonic processors firing two lines at the same time and then having an 'electron traffic light' to let one signal pass by making another wait. This may sound like a switch but it's not, because at no point are you actually 'stopping' electrons. If you don't produce a voltage your electrons aren't going to move in a current, so you haven't stopped them because you never fired them to start with. As i'm sure you realise, in digital electronics data transmission is acheived by voltage state. Changing state from 0 to 1 happens because you apply a voltage, and 0 to 1 because you stop applying it. With photonics, the equivalent must be turning the source on and off?
It may be beyond my knowledge of physic's but slowing down light within an optical processor (to better interface with other devices or traditional electronics or whatever) sounds like an alternative to having light signals running at a lower frequency (more time spent in each state so peripherals can spot signals). Slowing down light and introducing a delta velocity surely means we need a way to buffer light, much like a capacitor stores charge?
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."
Bingo. Today we have chemical batteries of all kinds for storing electricity. We have nothing to store photons. How will optical processors be supplied with photons to do their work? LEDs? What device will be controlling the LEDs to make them turn on and off at the high frequencies needed to produce useful pulses of light? Transistors? What will be so special about those transistors that lets them switch the LEDs on and off at sufficiently fast frequencies, that we wouldn't just use those transistors for electrical logic signaling in the first place?
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...