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Scale Models Can "Compute" Casimir Forces
KentuckyFC writes "Place two conducting parallel plates a few nanometres apart and the well-known but difficult-to-measure Casimir force will push them together. The force depends crucially on the shape of the plates but nobody is exactly sure how. That's because calculations with anything other than flat plates are fiendishly difficult and measurements are even harder. Now a group at MIT has come up with an ingenious new way to investigate Casimir forces. What the team has noticed is a mathematical analogy between the Casimir force acting on microscopic bodies in a vacuum and the electromagnetic behavior of macroscopic bodies floating in a conducting fluid. Their idea is to build a centimeter-scale metal model of the system they want to investigate, place it in salt water, and bombard it with microwaves and see what happens. The team says the experiment does not measure the force on the scale model but instead a quantity that is mathematically related to the force. So the experiment is not a simulator but actually an analog computer that calculates the force (abstract). What's exciting is that the method should for the first time give researchers a way of testing nano-machines designed to exploit the Casimir force."
Don't you wish you had a job where some very important work you're doing can be described thus:
Their idea is to build a centimeter-scale metal model of the system they want to investigate, place it in salt water, and bombard it with microwaves and see what happens.
This sounds like a Saturday afternoon in the garage with just a couple too many beers, an old tube tv, a broken microwave, and a friend that is just a little too happy to be 'experimenting' with stuff at your place because of the garage fire he had last year.
Props to Myth Busters for making 'blowing shit up' cool again...
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How does this setup possibly count as a "computer"? It's not. It's just a physical process whose input/output, under one interpretation, is isomorphic to that of a computation its user wants to know the result of ... oh, I see. Never mind!
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
until it can be rephrased in such a way that it asserts the ascendency of physicists over mathematicians. or the ascendency of mathematicians over physcists. i need to keep score. joke form is acceptable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Everyone knows that empty buses are constantly creating and destroying virtual passengers. You obviously were asleep in class the day they covered Kramden diagrams.
She's went from suck to blow!
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
And in the process of fine-tuning the explanation, you've managed to completely lose everyone. For your misjudgement, I sentence you to a year of hard labor, teaching kindergartners why you cannot pound a square Bessel function through a round hole.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!