Tying Knots With Light

thedreadedwiccan points out a summary of a recently released physics paper about tying knots with light. A pair of researchers showed that a relatively new solution to Maxwell's equations allows light to be twisted into stable loops. They are designing experiments to test the theory now, and it could have a big impact on fusion technology. The paper's abstract is available at Nature, though a subscription is required to see the rest. Quoting: "In special situations, however, the loops might be stable, such as if light travels through plasma instead of through free space. One of the problems that has plagued experimental nuclear fusion reactors is that the plasma at the heart of them moves faster and faster and tends to escape. That motion can be controlled with magnetic fields, but current methods to generate those fields still don't do the job. If Irvine and Bouwmeester's discovery could be used to generate fields that would send the plasma in closed, non-expanding loops and help contain it, 'that would be extremely spectacular,' Bouwmeester says."

Comments

The summary misses the key point

[Kupfernigk]

The light knots are secondary, the key point is solutions to the equations in which the electric and magnetic fields form closed loops. Otherwise the submission makes no sense, because the plasma in fusion experiments consists of matter, not photons.

Even so, why do I think this is not actually going to work? Because for the last fifty years, fusion power has been constantly just twenty years in the future, that's why. The authors don't claim a solution to fusion containment, they are talking about possible new ways of trapping photons or creating condensates.

Subscription required??

[linhares]

These science publishers are as evil or worse than the RIAA/MPAA with this paywall BS. To paraphrase, science is too important to be left to those that can pay 40 bucks per paper. I can't understand why Google, who wants to "organize the world's information", has not done anything to prevent the world's most valuable information from being inaccessible.

Re:Subscription required??

[boto]

Google has already done it: the researchers just need to make their papers publicly available *anywhere* on the Web, and you'll find the articles on Google Search and Google Scholar Search.

Google can't do much else if the authors aren't interested in making their works openly acessible.

Re:Subscription required??

[causality]

Well, they could zero the pagerank on sites that show different stuff to googlebot vs ordinary mortals.

If THAT'S all it is, then set your user agent to "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" and say fuck 'em. But you're right, Google should actively resist this sort of double standard because it's a detriment to the usefulness of the search engine. It doesn't matter how many great results you get with a search engine if you can't actually access the information in those results.

You know, I still don't understand why there is even such a thing as a user agent string. That is, I can see why i.e. Microsoft would want such a thing but I do not see any way that it's in the interests of users. If we really want standards and we really want openness, having no way for a Web server to determine what the browser is can only advance this goal. Then the only concern is whether that browser is standards-compliant.

Re:It's just cool (though maybe unrealistic)!

[Anonymous Coward]

no concession to the "Electric Universe" wackos!

While there are undoubtedly wackos out there, it's important not to be too absolute and dogmatic about unsubstantiated explanations for physical phenomena, because wackoness is always judged relative to current models rather than relative to the full but unknowable truth.

All it takes to turn a wacko into an annoying "I told you so" is some physicist doing some lateral thinking and coming out with a new theory or an extension to a current one which just turns out to be correct. And theoretical physicists have a habit of doing that.

While the majority of wackos are inevitably going to be wrong, a few are just as inevitably going to be right. Let the scientific method decide.

Re:It's just cool (though maybe unrealistic)!

[Anonymous Coward]

Take, as an example the Aristotle's "Luminiferous Ether" which was viable, then crazy after MichelsonMorley, and now - depending on the next 6 months at CERN, very similar concepts may not sound so crazy any more if physicists can observe Higgs... leading to a pervasive field in the universe that creates mass (not light... which the original idea was used to explain), but nonetheless kind of sort of very much like the (a)ether ideas.

Re:It's just cool (though maybe unrealistic)!

[Anonymous Coward]

We're actually using Maxwell-HEAVISIDE equations all over the world after Oliver Heaviside rewrote Maxwell's original equations from quaternion notation into a much simpler vector notation.. throwing out some interesting stuff along the way.

Oh regarding those Electric Universe 'wackos':

You do realize that you're also calling a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics a wacko, right?

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1970/alfven-bio.html

And so far their successful predictions should at least be called _interesting_ and not 'wacko' for anyone who follows the scientific approach with components like theory, predictions, verification, modification etc.

http://thunderbolts.info/predictions.htm

While the ideas of plasma cosmology seem radical. At this point to me they don't seem any more radical than the ideas put forth by standard cosmologists of multiple universes, dark matter, multiple dimensions, black holes, neutron stars spinning from 1.4ms(!!) to thirty seconds, strange matter, dark energy, etc..