I hope y'all get this politics sorted out asap, because the science world is progressing at a very quick clip these days. While I rarely write about candidates, which I know is the real purpose of this site, I cheer you on because the government y'all envision will help create a basis for technology to be implemented. And for good, instead of evil, which is our usual MO.
But this week was something special, extremely special. Three different new clever monkey tricks have come to light, and I would like to share.
Light and Matter have been united (as in we can convert light to matter and then back to light again).
We now have Quantum Computers (seriously, debuts next week).
And that engine from Back to the Future II is now a reality (but still needs a few years of R&D).
First off, Light and Matter United.
For those with a good physics background, here is your crack:
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/...
Light and matter united
Opens the way to new computers and communication systems
By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office
http://www.news.harvard.edu/...
This is the work of Lene Hau, who in 1998 was able to slow the speed of light down to 38 mph, which tuned the relativity world on its head. A few years later, she took it the next level and stopped light all together. But now, she has done the unthinkable according to physics as we currently know it.
Dr. Lene Hau, who has one-upped Einstein.
Staff Photo Justin Ide/Harvard News Office
Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud (of ultracold atoms -pt) then retrieved it from another cloud (ultracold atoms) nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.
In the experiment, a light pulse was slowed to bicycle speed by beaming it into a cold cloud of atoms. The light made a "fingerprint" of itself in the atoms before the experimenters turned it off. Then Hau and her assistants guided that fingerprint into a second clump of cold atoms. And get this - the clumps were not touching and no light passed between them.
"The two atom clouds were separated and had never seen each other before," Hau notes. They were eight-thousandths of an inch apart, a relatively huge distance on the scale of atoms.
The experimenters then nudged the second cloud of atoms with a laser beam, and the atomic imprint was revived as a light pulse. The revived light had all the characteristics present when it entered the first cloud of atomic matter, the same shape and wavelength. The restored light exited the cloud slowly then quickly sped up to its normal 186,000 miles a second.
This is some Star Trek level shit right here. We can now imprint clouds of atoms with information based on this technology, which would last forever and ever. There will be no degeneration of the media, and anything we write into the clouds of atoms can be retrieved by future generations as clear as a bell on a spring morning in Wales.
So how does this work:
A weird thing happens to the light as it enters the cold atomic cloud, called a Bose-Einstein condensate. It becomes squeezed into a space 50 million times smaller. Imagine a light beam 3,200 feet (one kilometer) long, loaded with information, that now is only a hair width in length but still encodes as much information.
From there it becomes easier to imagine new types of computers and communications systems - smaller, faster, more reliable, and tamper-proof.
Atoms at room temperature move in a random, chaotic way. But when chilled in a vacuum to about 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, under certain conditions millions of atoms lock together and behave as a single mass. When a laser beam enters such a condensate, the light leaves an imprint on a portion of the atoms. That imprint moves like a wave through the cloud and exits at a speed of about 700 feet per hour. This wave of matter will keep going and enter another nearby ultracold condensate. That's how light moves darkly from one cloud to another in Hau's laboratory.
This invisible wave of matter keeps going unless it's stopped in the second cloud with another laser beam, after which it can be revived as light again.
Atoms in matter waves exist in slightly different energy levels and states than atoms in the clouds they move through. These energy states match the shape and phase of the original light pulse. To make a long story short, information in this form can be made absolutely tamper proof. Personal information would be perfectly safe.
A lot easier thought exercise for this is to imagine a tin roof in the rain. Now imagine the sheer chaos in the rythmn of the rain drops and the sound that it makes. Now imagine if you were able to replicate two exact tin roofs in the exact same rainstorm. While the chances of this happening naturally are almost nil, like .000000000000000000001%, if you were able to set up such a system it would be one of the most secure ways to store information as if each raindrop was a spoke on the wheel in a musical box. In short, that is what she has done by making light into matter, and matter into light.
For more practical uses, go read the rest of the article.
But this leads us to the Quantum computer set to debut February 15, at the Science World at TELUS World of Science in Vancouver, British Columbia. Here is a sneak peak.
Quantum computer to debut next week
By Peter Judge, Techworld
D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach.
D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its stated aim is to eventually produce commercially available quantum computers that can be used online or shipped to computer rooms, where they will solve intractable and expensive problems such as financial optimisation.
It has been predicted that quantum computing will make current computer security obsolete, cracking any current cryptography scheme by providing an unlimited amount of simultaneous processing resources. Multiple quantum states exist at the same time, so every quantum bit or "qubit" in such a machine is simultaneously 0 and 1. D-Wave's prototype has only 16 qubits, but systems with hundreds of qubits would be able to process more inputs than there are atoms in the universe.
<snip>
"This is somewhat like claims of cold fusion," said Professor Andrew Steane of Oxford University's Centre for Quantum Computing. "I doubt that this computing method is substantially easier to achieve than any other."
I agree with Professor Steane, proof is in the pudding. The sheer possibility of running parallel universal qubit processes would end computing as we know it. A golden era will be ushered in. Hell, we might even finally compute Pi. This will also open up fields such a Virtual reality generation, space/time calculations for entire galaxies, solve seating charts at weddings and will make on hell of a wrist watch.
Let's see what D-Wave has to say over at their blog:
http://dwave.wordpress.com/...
The Orion system is a hardware accelerator designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem called the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field. It is built around a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. The system is designed to be used in concert with a conventional front end for any application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem.
Here is an optical picture of the processor we’ll be using for the demo. This particular circuit contains 16 qubits (the quasi-circular loops arranged in a 4×4 array). Each of the qubits is coupled to its nearest neighbors (N, S, E, W) and next-nearest neighbors (NW, NE, SW, SE) via a tunable flux transformer, giving a total of 42 of these couplers.
Using an Orion system is extremely simple. I’m going to post more about this later, but qualitatively the way it works is that when your software application needs to solve an NP-complete problem, it passes the problem to the Orion system instead of whatever solver you’d be otherwise using. Nothing changes about how your app is architected.
At the demo, what we’re going to do is run two different applications, live, on an Orion system residing in Burnaby, BC. Orion is designed such that it can be used remotely, and this is the mode we’ll be using for the demos.
That's pretty damn ambitious. Anyone who lives in Vancouver and can go, please do and let us know how it works. One can only imagine the outcome if a parallel qubit system decides to kick out a "Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all" error. Here are a couple of pics of the futuristic machine that is here now, and oh, according to D-Wave, they plan to ramp up to 1000 qubits by 2008. These pictures prove how beautiful science can be.
The Quantum Computer:
The sound you hear is Redmond crying.
So, last but definitely not least, is the tactical biorefinery, which ran Dr. Emmett Brown's Delorean in Back to the Future. Rember when the Doctor and Marty were through trash into the engine to power the car? Well, we got that shit too now.
Scientists develop portable generator that turns trash into electricity
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/...
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A group of scientists have created a portable refinery that efficiently converts food, paper and plastic trash into electricity. The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future.
Roughly the size a small moving van, the biorefinery could alleviate the expense and potential danger associated with transporting waste and fuel. Also, by eliminating garbage remnants - known in the military as a unit's "signature" - it could protect the unit's security by destroying clues that such refuse could provide to enemies.
Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell
Researchers tested the first tactical biorefinery prototype in November and found that it produced approximately 90 percent more energy than it consumed, said Jerry Warner, founder of Defense Life Sciences LLC, a private company working with Purdue researchers on the project. He said the results were better than expected.
The tactical biorefinery first separates organic food material from residual trash, such as paper, plastic, Styrofoam and cardboard. The food waste goes to a bioreactor where industrial yeast ferments it into ethanol, a "green" fuel. Residual materials go to a gasifier where they are heated under low-oxygen conditions and eventually become low-grade propane gas and methane. The gas and ethanol are then combusted in a modified diesel engine that powers a generator to produce electricity.
Of course, being Americans, we had to use this for war first. Hey, it's just what we do, and why I refuse to patent or publish anything I make, like my ion cannon. But this technology is definitely in its alpha stage, but within three generations, with some quality micronization, we might get this down to a portable or home-use level.
For anyone looking to get off the grid, this is more promising than solar panels as it can also take care of your refuse issues. But one the key problems with this technology at the moment is the need to prime the system with diesel oil to charge the gasifier and bioreactor. I expect a combination of technologies to solve that issue.
But first we have to stop using it war and evil.
Bonus odd new technology:
Yuki-taro autonomous snowplow robot
http://www.pinktentacle.com/...
I love the Japanese, and their crazy robots. I mostly like how cute they make them. I mean just look at this little guy:
Makes you wonder, when they final make their killer robot soldiers, will they look like Hello Kitty?