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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."
To be blunt, your toaster is very much four dimensional if you care about its color.
In ML we talk about feature spaces having hundreds of dimensions and are just being accurate. The things you care about are the dimensions. Want Euclidean dimension in space? There are three dimensions. Dimensionality of spin? One for each of the quantities.
If we want to sound smart, we explain the theory behind SVMs and how it's in an infinite dimensional space:-)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
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