"Time Telescope" Could Boost Fibre-Optic Communications

An anonymous reader writes "A time lens can focus a chunk of time to a point, rather like a normal lens focuses light rays. Put two time lenses together and you can create what a Cornell University team calls a 'time domain telescope' which can magnify time. They sent a 2.5 nanosecond long light pulse, encoding 24 bits of information, into their time telescope. What came out on the other side was the same 24 bit pulse, but compressed into 92 picoseconds. Squashing more information into a light pulse could help to send more information via optical fibres."

Comments

salesman speak

[circletimessquare]

"A time lens can focus a chunk of time to a point, rather like a normal lens focuses light rays."

no, its not LIKE a normal lens, it IS a normal lens. kind of like how "cloud computing" is the same client/ server model of decades past, a "times lens" is basically, uh, gee, a lens. but made sexy by introducing scifi fantasy terminology for the sake of grabbing attention

Re:salesman speak

[RightSaidFred99]

Client/server is a communications model. Cloud computing is a business model, a management model, a deployment model, etc... You might as well say "networking" is the real concept, and that fancy "cloud computing" is just a PHB term for "networking". Let's just call cloud "computer networking!".

Cloud computing isn't about a "client" and a "server". It's about moving more of your data and business processes off systems and software you support and letting someone else do it.

Cloud computing will have client server components. So what? When I use my Xbox 360 to play games over the internet should I tell people I'm using a "client/server system" or that I'm playing my god damn Xbox 360?

It's fun to mock the Latest Thing, and sometimes it deserves it, but cloud computing is not just a fancy name for Client/Server.

Re:Time compression?

[radtea]

Doesn't that mean they compressed the amount of time it took light to travel that distance, and therefore changed the speed of light? Or was this simply a compression of the distance between the photons?

Neither. They've created a frequency upshifter (possibly one with interesting spectral properties to preserve the integrity of the encoded information, although the New Sensationalist article is so completely incoherent it's impossible to say if they have actually achieved that result) and given it the most dishonest, misleading name possible to confuse people, as posters above have noted, to grab attention.

They've got attention, but they haven't conveyed any information.