Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Trap a Rainbow
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Physicists from both the University of Surrey and Salford University have devised a method to trap a multi-colored rainbow of light inside a prism. "Previous attempts to slow and capture light have involved extremely low or cryogenic temperatures, have been extremely costly, and have only worked with one specific frequency of light at a time. The technique proposed by Professor Hess and Mr Kosmas Tsakmakidis involves the use of negative refractive index metamaterials along with the exploitation of the Goos Hänchen effect, which shows that when light hits an object or an interface between two media it does not immediately bounce back but seems to travel very slightly along that object, or in the case of metamaterials, travels very slightly backwards along the object."
It shouldn't hurt to be a photon.
Did they get the pot of gold as well?
There's a protest against capturing rainbows going on today in NY... looks like it's a murky ethical question...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
that if Apple brings back the old logo they will rule the Intarweb tubes?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
can . Big deal.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
...Over or UNDER the bridge?
(Captcha: cadaver)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
scientists announcing they've replicated stars, and Comcast buys it for a "Wish On Demand" service?
Or they don't. They propose a method that might. The meta-materials needed to do this with visible light don't exist yet.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
The Phantom Zone isn't a nice place.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
!rorrim ym ni kcuts m'I ,em pleh esaelp
Are they stacking these prisms into pyramids, like Abu Ghraib (and Dachau)?
Ponies and rainbows! Who will save the ponies and rainbows?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Roads all across Ireland are blocked by thousands of Leprechauns protesting against capturing and inhumane treating of rainbows.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Hi -- I've been an avid Slashdot troll for a number of years now, but lately I've wanting to branch out. You see, with Slashdot, there is no new ground to be covered. Every troll thinkable has been done at least a hundred times. But there are a ton of virgin websites that would be just a sheer delight to troll. Here, a GNAA posting gets modded to oblivion in a heartbeat. But what would happen if a similar "group" would be created on a website like laptopvideo2go.com ? There is a lot of potential on websites like that... with a small, dedicated group of righteous and uppity users. So I bring my question to the community: What fresh, new websites are ripe for trolling, slashdot style? I await the communty's response!
Who can take a rainbow?
Trap it in a prism?
Use a negative refractive index so it's slower than... uh, need a rhyme for prism... your jism?
The candyman. The candyman can.
The candyman can 'cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.
Yeah, I think I'll post this one anonymously.
Has anyone worked on making devices or materials that channel light along a very long internal optical path folded up inside a small volume? Maybe some kind of photonic crystal that takes a laser input at a precisely calibrated angle, that reflects off nanoscopic features all throughout, or an optical medium with precisely aligned internal reflecting surfaces to cycle the light around, moving across the reflection surfaces gradually with each cycle through them, until the light reflects at an angle that escapes? Since photons interact only at the locus where they actually interfere and travels straight without confinement, the light doesn't need extra structure to segregate it. A long enough reflection path could emit light at its end only after a long time internally reflecting, which could offer enough time to move a properly positioned reflector "cap" over the entrance/exit. That device wouldn't slow light, but it would delay it, and then store it, entirely optically. Perhaps offering a purely photonic battery.
Am I making this up myself, or is it serendipity?
--
make install -not war
if they had just done a cursory literature search on the phenomenon, they would have realized that previous experiments on the phenomenon has produced disasterous results for the researchers, and jennifer aniston
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't Hänchen German for chicken? That would make him Goos Chicken.
It would be nice if the "journalists" bothered to mention there's an article in Nature.
Namaste
There may be a prism on the dark side of the moon that produces rainbows... or so an ungodly amount of acid apparently led Pink Floyd to believe.
stuff |
This discovery is FABULOUS!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I hate to have to do this, but...
I have been the victim of clueless moderator abuse. Mod this post as informative to right the wrong! As a result of two instances MODERATOR abuse my Karma has been rendered bad, which means my default score is 0. This means that I have no voice here. I am trying to do this the right way and avoid creating a new account. If you hate injustice, then at least mod me to 1 or 2 so that I can get my voice back. If I have to create a new account just to make contributions, you can bet that I'll use this account to troll everyone else (because if I am going to be labeled a troll, I might as well have some fun), and that will just make for more line noise here. I'd like to avoid that.
It's not narcissicism if it's true!
Good! Trip over the power cable quick and we'll never be bothered by those annoying creations Bungle, Zippy, Aunty and Telltale ever again.
Though in hindsight that might of made more sense to the UK readers.....
Who can trap a rainbow / in a crystal ball?
Dip it into chocolate / and then give it to us all?
The Candy Man / The Candy Man can.
Gay!
I skimmed the article and the conclusion I got was that for now this belongs with the earlier main page post about the top 10 snake oil products http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/1616248. Nothing has actually been done to prove that this procedure is actually possible. This is an example of the worst in modern science. Publish of research via press release. There has been no Peer Review, this isn't being linked to from a scientific journal, it's a theory with no evidence to support it being possible. For all I know it is a sound theory, but until I see some experimental evidence it's just smoke and mirrors.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I am surprised that no one has mentioned "Slow Glass" yet. One of the saddest SciFi stories ever.
Today we found it! The Rainbow Connection, for Lovers Deamers and You. La De da dee de da..
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it."
- Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes
M*thaf*cka!
Hess and Tsakmakidis went on to say that they would not have to worry about seeking funding in the future. They feel that they're very close to finding the elusive pot of gold.
Then a unicorn came and kicked my ass. Fucking unicorns.
They are after me Lucky Charms.. What will lucky think?
That illegal immigrant 'Lucky' and confiscate his 'charms'
Props to the carebearstare tag, but why not Rainbow Brite? ....okay, i'm being silly.
There's this device that's been around for over a century. It's called a "camera". Since a rainbow is simply a band of color caused by refraction of light, capturing a record of that band of color on film (or digital media) is, in effect, captuting the rainbow itself.
Now if you could catch the leprechaun that would be a different story!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Metamaterials? If they're not actual materials, then WTF are they?
Question everything
"The technique...involves the use of negative refractive index metamaterials along with the exploitation of the Goos Hänchen effect, which shows that when light hits an object or an interface between two media it does not immediately bounce back but seems to travel very slightly along that object, or in the case of metamaterials, travels very slightly backwards along the object."
Aw hell, I could've told you that.
Next on the agenda is to catch a falling star and put it in their pocket.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. -- Michel de Montaigne
Apart from being extremely literary (puzzle references to Prufrock's love song among other things), this game was incredibly complex in it's movement across past, future and present. And the slow light flashlight was the icing on the cake - it illuminated an object with light from the objects past, enabling the player to view what the object WAS - it would be scary and exciting if this was a step towards making the SlowLight real.
And you can shine it on aging body-parts to recapture past buff-ness :)
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
to capture Oz too?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Read the article, it's a theory. They didn't actually build it. They just proposed it. to really do it, they need a real multispectrum transparent material with a negative index of refraction. (Same thing they need to build an invisibility chamber. Can you say "Unobtanium"?)
Experimental physics is littered with beautiful theories that never worked in practice.
Show us the trapped rainbow, please.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Ronnie James Dio has has this technology for years
Angels released the waters from above and from the deep when God's bow, which used to serve as a reminder that He wouldn't flood the Earth again, was captured by misguided scientists.
"We didn't think we were doing anything wrong; I mean, the rainbow looked neat. It's not like we had any arrows big enough to shoot from it."
"How were we to know we'd be the ones to make 'Waterworld' a reality?"
Thankfully, God quickly scolded the Angels in question and reset His bow in the heavens. The scientists were sternly warned not to capture His bow again, but were given clues into human cloning and the nature of dust and ribs.
I hope they catch a Unicorn next! So I can prove them all that I wasn't crazy, right Jenny? Jenny doesn't like electroshocks, right Jenny? Jenny... jenny
Looks like we're close to having the Light Saving Brick (watch the video).
Peter, you've lost the news!
And with that, I've lost our American audience...
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
Next we will have Sean Connery running around in a diaper trying to break the prism so he can kill immortals.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
It would have been nice to see what the trapped rainbow looks like. It is too bad the article does not contain an actual picture of it. This seems quite common of many articles of some fascinating discovery, heavy on hype, but not providing much data or depictions of it actually in action.
How does slow light speed up the internet? wouldn't slow light take more time to cross tubes thus slowing the internet? or is my understanding of "slow" that whack?
Lucky was last seen in Boston in TD Banknorth Garden Arena supporting the Celtics.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Why do you think they got rid of the rainbow in the first place?
I bet someone made this name up, sounds like straight out of Duck tales.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Great: Now capture a Hooloovoo (a hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue).
I am officially gone from
We're only a couple proofs away from Kyle having to suck Cartman's balls.
What does it mean that I read the title as "Scientists Crap a Rainbow ... in your mind!"?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Is Going To Be Pissed When They Find Out About This.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/1616248
Jerry Falwell was right about the tellatubbies (tell-a-tubbies, tellytubbies, whatever), not because one was gay or something but because they all represented a coming threat ... from toy manufacturer's & retailers of Chinese toys. He was in essence giving us a prophetic warning that we were going to suffer from and at the hands of our addiction + subservience to the commercialized toy industry AND how they use the TV medium to do an evil upon us all. It isn't unusual for a prophet to be right but interpreting his prophecy/prophetic vision incorrectly or low-balling what it meant. Not that I'm saying Falwell was a true prophet, just a regular prophet with a large soapbox. No big deal. Many contributors to Slash /. are trying to be prophets and maybe some just really are:
I personally think when our Sun goes into expansion 5,000,000,000 years from now it will absorb the Earth and many planets for fuel and then, its appetite satisfied be regenerated and reduce back into a good old boy friendly-planet size and live on another 5,000,000,000 years after having eaten our poor planet, possibly then to be left without any planets at all or perhaps while its Gravity Field is expanded it will pull in Pluto plus some new planets from beyond Pluto and start all over again.
Sort of like a self-cleaning oven. So that's my "prophecy" for today: Planet Earth will live on, inside our living Sun that got hungry and ate us for the hydrogen, crude oil and yummy methane. Oh how we liked her, now how we future-in-advance mourn her. She was a good planet til we made a few hundred million combustion engines that put out the carbon dioxide equivalent of 400 horses on the hoof. Apiece. Have to admit though dudes, it was a great ride while it lasted.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
This indicates that these metamaterials are able to produce superluminal effects! Red moving faster than blue!