Slashdot Mirror
Tiniest Lamp Spans Quantum, Classical Physics
Urchin writes "Physicists in California have made the smallest ever incandescent lamp using a carbon nanotube as the filament. The nanotube is so small it behaves as a quantum mechanical system but it's just large enough that the classical physics rules of thermodynamics should apply. Analyzing the light emitted from the tiny light will give the team a better picture of what happens in the twilight zone between the quantum and classical worlds." The New Scientist article doesn't mention the researchers' surprise, as the abstract does: "Remarkably, the heat equation and Planck's law together give a precise, quantitative description of the light intensity as a function of input power, even though the nanotube's small size places it outside the thermodynamic limit."
How dare they build an incandescent lamp! Where's the outrage? Don't you guys here think that incandescents should be banned? Since they're wasteful and all?
Or maybe you take the "non-absurd" position that incandescent bulb usage should be allowed, just as long as a central committee approves of your intended usage?
Because the truly absurd position is to just cap the total emissions and let people do whatever they want within that limit, right?
(Flamebait, I know, but some people really don't understand the implications and inefficiency of banning incandescent light bulbs.)
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
They can't turn into a dog or a cat and thus disprove evolution. Evolution was just a theory after all. - Texas Board of Education.