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Stanford's Quantum Hologram Sets Storage Record
eldavojohn writes "It's often assumed that representing data reaches a limit when you get to the point that an atom represents one bit in some form or fashion. But Stanford University researchers have used a quantum hologram model to store the characters 'S' and 'U' by encoding the data at a rate of 35 bits per electron."
One thing most 'futurists' agree on is that the ultimate 'end game' of technology appears to be the conversion of all matter in the solar system into machine parts and computational elements. It's a logical end result of exponential growth. (and, actually, would be only the beginning : such a 'civilization' would eventually grow to convert the entire universe, but this would take much longer due to the snails pace of light)
It's neat to think that such a civilization could store even more information than an obvious cap of '1 bit per atom'.
If I understand holography and what they're doing correctly (and I DID work as a tech in Emmett Leith's lab so I have some clue), they're transforming the information.
Yes, each electron has information from 35 bits. But more than one electron has that same information, encoded differently. How many storage electrons do they need to encode it in a way that is recoverable?
The information per electron is the total information encoded divided by the total number of electrons needed to encode it at a high enough resolution to be recovered.
Also: The illustration of the way they're encoding it looks like it's not just electrons that encode it, but also their absence. Add in HOLES to the count of "things encoding the bits".
I'll be surprised if the total comes out to more than one bit per electron site. (Note that they may get more than one such site per atom.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way