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Repulsive Force Discovered In Light
Aurispector writes in with news that the Yale team that recently discovered an attractive force between two light beams in waveguides has now found a corresponding repulsive force. "'This completes the picture,' [team lead Hong] Tang said. 'We've shown that this is indeed a bipolar light force with both an attractive and repulsive component.' The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels. Previously, the engineers used the attractive force they discovered to move components on the silicon chip in one direction, such as pulling on a nanoscale switch to open it, but were unable to push it in the opposite direction. Using both forces means they can now have complete control and can manipulate components in both directions. 'We've demonstrated that these are tunable forces we can engineer,' Tang said."
Sweet! Next up, how lightsabers don't work.
Ahhh finally a scientific explanation of why girls are repulsed by me! Its not my lude jokes... its light!
Just like my ex-girlfriend!
Dark Reflection
is for an alcoholic millionaire to cram it into a suit of armor!
That which does not kill us makes us... st
... an explanation as to why so many WoW geeks shriek when they leave their parents'.... errrmmm.... their basements during the day.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
"Repulsive Force Discovered In Light"--well DUH. Anyone who's ever been in a strip club at closing time has witnessed this phenomenon.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Huh, I had always wondered how to resolve conservation of light's angular momentum during destructive interference of collinear laser pulses consisting of phtons of the same "handedness." I wonder if this can be used to explain that.
Light has an attractive and repulsive component. Sounds like Star Trek deflector and tractor beams to me. Who knows what they will be able to do with this in a hundred years or so.
Augh! The light! It burns! It burnsssssss!
http://www.object404.com
While discovering new properties of old phenomena is interesting,
does anyone ever question the 'bravado' of the wording of such
discoveries?
Does it inhibit later discoveries, in creating artificial limitations
through language and subsequently expectation?
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
What the crap is an article about a newly found force that doesn't explain at least a theory as to the source of the force? Is it magnetic?
Post is tagged "disgusting", "repulsorblast" and "midichlorians"... Fascinating, the minds of whoever comes up with such tags all the time.
Possibly, but this looks like the effect of light beams interacting inside of a target dialectric combined with the differences in light's angular momentum at the different speeds of c inside and outside the target. Aside from also cooking whatever you wanted to tractor, you might be able to accomplish this with very powerful laser pulses and "cloaking" metamaterials. Since the metamaterials bend the relevent light frequencey around a target you may be able to exert the force on the material, use a vastly powerful laser pulse, and not cook the target. This could impart enough force to be useful and could be used to maintain a cloud of such objects over vast distances using a web of laser pulses pushing and pulling the disparate objects into a desired position. Kind of a neat idea and a good intuitive leap to suggest tractor beams
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12961080/
Now emits 100% attractive light. That's twice as much as the next leading brand!
Can anyone enlighten me? I thought there were only the strong and weak interaction, electromagnetism and gravity.
Is this some effect of electromagnetism? Or of one of the other forces?
Because if it were none of this forces, it would pretty much throw the whole standard model of quantum physics into a blender and force us to put it together again, wouldn't it?
This is really really interesting to me!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So Earth finally discovers the repulsive force from the ninth light ray that they've known about on the dying planet of Barsoom for millennia. Does that mean that soon we can have navies of huge floating ships like the Kingdom of Helium does? Or that soon we'll be able to see the two colors they know about on Barsoom that we've never seen on Earth?
I already knew that light repelled me.
This was previously demonstrated by cockroaches.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Kabbalah refers to these two alternating properties of light as "direct light" and "returning light". Light alternates between these two opposing, yet mutually complementary characteristics as it is either reflected or absorbed by the observer (depending on the current configuration of the observer).
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Billions of moths scream out in horror.
finally, they've found out what was missing from the promise of a low-energy, low-heat, ultra-fast future in optical computing: Moving parts!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Your girlfriend was a photon? Now I know some guys who like skinny girls, but that's ridiculous.
As I understand it, current thinking is that light bends because of gravity, and this is how distant planets and other distant objects are found.
Could it be that it is, instead, is just light being pulled or pushed against something that is being observed, rather than an observation of the gravity that the body has?
The next effect is the same I guess.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
It IS repulsive!
Now, data (or Data) can join the dark side, and display a tension-deficit disorder
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I discovered the repulsive force of light long time ago here on Slashdot. There are even convincing demos to demonstrate the effect: Goatse, Tubgirl, 2 girs 1 cup and Lemon Party.
Thanks for link!
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
There are a lot of jokes as replies, I assume partially because the summary sets them up so well and partially because it is rather dense subject matter. But doesn't this stuff excite you? Years ago a friend and I used to talk about how there should be a way to make computers out of light and we should just try for that, because, well, there isn't much faster. Articles like this mean its closer to reality. Even if it never happens in my life time it still excites me to know we are headed there.
I am sure some physicist is now going to tell me how it's actually better to use some other quantum something for computing and how I don't understand light and subatomic particles/waves/strings/finnegans. I know I don't. I just like the idea of light computers.
In this case, the fundamental reality is, of course, that each photon splits up at the grating and its wave function takes all paths- interfering with itself everywhere in space. When the photon is discovered hitting a screen, it will strike in a place that reveals the least amount of information about the path it actually took, and there will be many such places, called "interference maxima". (It probably won't land in a place that makes it obvious how it got there- such places are interference minima.)
The Casimir force is another "force" like this. Underneath it's still quantum electrodynamics.
If you find this stuff interesting you should read Feynman's QED... basically Quantum Electrodynamics For Dummies. What you'll find is interesting:
These guys are sending beams of IR photons down a channel that is 220nm x 220nm, smaller than their wavelength. So transverse wave motion isn't a consideration at all... the light can barely fit in there and its wavefunction inside has no longitudinal component. I think it can be totally described with two scalar functions along the waveguide. The photons have apparently been through a beamsplitter or something and are being recombined out of phase. It's too bad the article doesn't provide any further details on how the photons were polarized (circular, linear, what?) or how the quantum interference between the two photon states results in transverse forces on the waveguide.
Tesla??? didnt he demonstrate this before? yawn...
www.twilightcampaign.net
There are even convincing demos to demonstrate the effect: Goatse
Yes, if you spread away any obstacles, the sun shines even where it usually doesn't...
How do these newly-discovered forces change our interpretation of astronomical observations? Although the universe could be considered mostly empty, it does contain a hell of a lot of light. Could these forces be nudging stars and planets and things around? Does it have implications for gravitational lensing? Could it help to explain dark matter and energy?
So, does this attraction and repulsion explain why photons act like a wave instead of individual particles?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarkovsky_effect
They look related...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Ok, where do I sign up for Ubuntu's light version? Since everything is going 64 bit and in the cloud!
Sorry Wesley Crusher. We came up with the idea first.....
But feel free to take credit for it when you save the Enterprise.
All I ever needed to create something repulsive with light was Google Image Search.
Ugh. That is so digusting.
Reading stuff like this at a too early age helped get me into physics rather than law...my bank account hates science fiction.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is epic. This means, theoretically, that on a nano scale, you can build a gravity gun, like the one in Half-Life 2.
about photons from images of fat people having sex.
There's no interference from electrical signals, but there is interference from light. And rather than needing a large number of electrical wires, this requires large numbers of light waveguides.
This means, theoretically, that the gravity gun is possible. At least, on a nano level. So all they have to do now is figure out how to create a gun with a light source powerful enough to move all of the nano particles stored in a bathtub, and HL2 will be a reality.
Explanation for Pioneer Anomaly?
Find anti-gravity already. I want my flying car!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
In this case, the fundamental reality is, of course, that each photon splits up at the grating and its wave function takes all paths- interfering with itself everywhere in space. When the photon is discovered hitting a screen, it will strike in a place that reveals the least amount of information about the path it actually took
Or the light wave propagates through the aether and this transversal force is simply bernoulli's principle.
P.S. Michaelson&Morley didn't give a negative result, they found a result inconsistent with a FIXED aether, but fully consistent with a fluidic aether.
You can't take the sky from me...
Could this new-found force somehow be related to what is causing the universe to continue to expand? Or otherwise account for forces now attributed to "dark matter"?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The repulsive force of light has long been documented by those facing Saturday's inevitable dawn.
May the attractive and repulsive force be with you.