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Researchers Store Optical Data In Five Dimensions
Al writes "Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia, have developed an optical material capable of storing information in five dimensions. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers were able to write six different patterns within the same area. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interference. The team achieved a storage density of 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of 10 nanorod layers."
..that my toaster is four dimensional because I can describe it as "silver".
This is cool enough as it is, I don't understand why the technobabble was added: polarization and color information layers may be novel attributes of a disc but there's no real reason to describe them as "5-dimensional" other than to sound physics-y.
Sweet, more vaporware that will never hit shelves for less than $20,000 a disk, if it ever makes it out at all (possibly a hyperbole). Just like holographic storage. While the idea is fascinating that it can store in x,y,z, polarization, and wavelength, I wonder if this will ever lead to anything practical besides a geekgasm at the idea of a 1cm^2 TB thumbdrive.
That's not the same as having six dimensions.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
TA talks about disks etc. Solid state is the future, if I am not mistaken. We can have any number of flash memory "layers" even now... capacity is no longer the most important factor, other parameters like "write speeds" are.
This should have been tagged "vapor ware". What about the materials involved (gold) ? Re-write ability ? Speed of write ? Speed of reads ? Possible seek times ? How well manufacturing of this scales ? etc.
A classic example given in programming is a 6 dimensional array.
1. Building
2. Floor
3. Wing
4. Room
5. Shelf
6. Book
I guess I've been accustomed to thinking about larger dimension numbers than 3 or 4 for a long time.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Seeing that the fourth dimension is TIME just what is the 5h and 6th?
You may be mistaken. In 1993 you were probably reading about the amazing gnarly research of storing 700 mb on CD media (what? more than 650!) or the amazing hard drive like 100 mb zip drive! (ooooooh, that is like the SAME size as my hard drive, but it's PORTABLE!) I jest of course. I DO however remember reading about blue ray tech around 1996 though. There have been a LOT of developments like this, but the number one determining factor IMHO has been MARKETING, followed by consumer price.
You left our its orientation (3D) and it's angular monmentum (3D) (assuming non-point objects). Hence 12-D at least.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
There is no "the" anythingth dimension; a dimension is just a property or variable that can be changed independantly of other dimensions within the context. So, in many areas of physics, the four dimensions you use in equations etc will often include time, but that doesn't mean that time is some universal dimension to be found in all equasions. For this storage, when you do the reading/writing is irrelevant to the data, eg, if you write a 1 at 4pm, it will be the same as if you wrote that 1 at 5pm. But, if you write it in a different colour, then the data is different, so, the data at any location can be expressed as a function of the intensity of each of the three colours (or wavelengths) and the intensity of the two different polorizations of light - five dimensions.
If for example you want to talk about the mass of any of the points where data's stored, then what matters is how many atoms there are there, nothing else is relevant, and so you'd only say there's one dimension.
So as you see, dimensions aren't universal things, they're purely contextual.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
How is this a misuse of the word 'dimension'? It doesn't necessarily refer to a spatial dimension.
In Clifford / Geometric Algebras, which are the correct type of algebras for physics, if there are n dimensions (orthogonal vectors) then there are 2^n degrees of freedom. The grades of the degrees of freedom go by the rows of Pascal's triangle.
For 3-D that is 1 scalar (for real number coefficients), 3 vectors (x,y,z), 3 bivectors (xy, yz, zx - planes of rotation) and 1 pseudoscalar (xyz - volume). (xy = outer product of x and y, often written x^y. x^y = -y^x)
In 4-D space-time: 1 scalar (n) - 4 vectors (x,y,z,t) - 6 bivectors (xy, yz, zx, xt, yt, zt -the latter 3 are velocities revealed as rotations)- 4 trivectors - (xyz, xyt, yzt, zxt - the latter 3 are spins) - 1 pseudoscalar (xyzt). ("t" will have a square (inner product, x^2=x.x) opposite in sign to the other three dimensions, usually t^2=1 x^2=-1.)
Google "geometric algebra tutorial" for more about the physical meaning. It beats the hell out of cross products, quaternions, and many applications of linear algebra and tensors.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
mind you, that is no worse than calling stereoscopic pictures or movies "3D". But true 3D is holographic.
I don't have a good grasp on the intricacies of DVDs, but if you're saying that information is recorded on DVDs in three parameters, then yes, it could be called 3-dimensional. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension