Slashdot Mirror
"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."
I'm used to these physics guys doing all kinds of crazy things with invisibility cloaks and such so I took the title to be a literal time lense.
After RTFA, the "time lense" is a frequency up-shifter. Still impressive, but not supernatural as I had hoped.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
When I logged in, I was greeted with "Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future?"
This is a complete oversell on a normal everyday phenomenon. This is a simple compression of a lightpulse, and has been done for a long time. Dispersion usually smears out a pulse, but can easily, compress the pulse. There is no "bending of time" here. Look up "Chirped pulse amplification" and also "Prism compressor", and maybe "soliton". First descibed in 1834 by John Scott Russell
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org