Light stopped?!

[JJohnson 0]

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/06.14/01-cold.html

My stepson showed me this one. It's from last year, you might have seen it already. I'm sure it has some real technical potential for some cool shit. But just the fact that they managed to lower the temperature to absolute zero.......and stop a beam of light......boggles my mind. Damn, next thing you know they'll have electric can openers.

JJ

JJ

"Call me Darth Balls"

[Viking 0]

holyshit thats impressive!!!!

I swear you must have footprints on the back of your helmet - chicagoskydiver
My God has a bigger dick than your god -George Carlin

[JJohnson 0]

Yeah, freaked me out. We can stop light, but can't find Bin Laden, stop child pornography or cure the common cold.
JJ

JJ

"Call me Darth Balls"

[billvon 3,120]

Well, it's not quite absolute zero, but it's really, really close. I think the really cool thing is the creation of a Bose-Einsteinian condensate; it's essentially a new form of matter that rarely, if ever, appears in the universe.

[JJohnson 0]

I was kinda lost there. It says it has characteristics of a fluid, as in it flows..but without resistance. Kinda hard to get a visual on that. Was also curious what could be done with such a substance?
With all the options it opened, the only thing I could think about was to make a suit out of it for invisibility. However if light stopped at the suit, you wouldn't be invisible would you. There'd be a person shaped light?
JJ

JJ

"Call me Darth Balls"

[newshooter12 0]

but the moment you went out of the cold it would speed up and your suit would be gone right???

[JJohnson 0]

If I read it right they were saying they would but chips in computers that would do the same thing...I took that as if the "cold" area was portable.
At the very least you could make one awesome beer cooler.
JJ

JJ

"Call me Darth Balls"

[newshooter12 0]

I guess I've got to read it now... how many applications would benefit from the cold. Part of getting rid of some diseases is through the use of vaccines, but most of them have to stay cold to be usable and that's hard to do while transporting them through 3rd world countries. The cold would sure help.

[indyz 1]

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There'd be a person shaped light?

Actually, there'd be a person shaped who-know-what. If the light can't move, it can't travel to your eye, so you couldn't see it. Other light could bounce off of that, and you could see that, maybe.

One of the jumpers at U of I is a condensed matter physics post-doc. I'll have to ask him what the hell it means.

[billvon 3,120]

>Kinda hard to get a visual on that.

One way to look at it is that atoms in a BEC are like photons in a laser beam - they are 'coherent' and essentially identical.

>Was also curious what could be done with such a substance?

Slowing light down significantly has some interesting applications for data storage and light processing. If you can slow down light arbitrarily, and maintain an arbitrarily complex waveform, you can store a lot of data in a BEC. They may also make good 'light transistors' since their optical properties can be manipulated by other light beams and magnetic fields.

>With all the options it opened, the only thing I could think about was to make
> a suit out of it for invisibility.

Well, I think you'd just look like a dark blob if you were "in" a BEC. Be interesting to consider the EM environment inside a BEC though.

[FallingILweenie 0]

if the suit stopped light, wouldnt you also be blind when wearing the suit?

[jtval 0]

that is crazy. I bet it will fuck up traffic signals too!

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[ernokaikkonen 0]

>if the suit stopped light, wouldnt you also be blind when wearing the suit?

Hey! that's something I've thought about before:

If you're invisible(say, by magic...), the photons that usually enter your eyes and cause chemical reactions in your retina, in turn sending signals to your optic nerve, wouldn't cause the chemical reaction cause they(the photons) pass right through you. Therefore you'd be blind.

Yes Professor Kallend, if one is using magic, one does not need to worry about the constraints of the physical world. Just a thought I wanted to share. ;)

[happythoughts 0]

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Yeah, freaked me out. We can stop light, but can't find Bin Laden, stop child pornography or cure the common cold.
JJ

If you slow down light, then my solar-powered flashlight wouldn't work.

[happythoughts 0]

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If I read it right they were saying they would but chips in computers that would do the same thing...I took that as if the "cold" area was portable.
At the very least you could make one awesome beer cooler.
JJ

As far as computer applications go, the main advantage is speed. One of the problems of electricity is the resistance of the wire. The colder you get it, the less resistance. Less resistance, faster speed. Cray tried to get around this by just shortening the length of the wires.

[bmcd308 0]

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If I read it right they were saying they would but chips in computers that would do the same thing...I took that as if the "cold" area was portable.
At the very least you could make one awesome beer cooler.
JJ

Current best beer cooler:

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/

----------------------------------
www.jumpelvis.com

[happythoughts 0]

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But just the fact that they managed to lower the temperature to absolute zero.......and stop a beam of light......boggles my mind.

So they cool this thing down until light stops... is that a waste of a good theory or what?

Around my house, we've had a device that has been doing that for years. We close the refrigerator door. It stops the light and keeps stuff cool at the same time. Seems like a bunch of Harvard pointy-heads would be able to figure this out.

You can't get good bar-b-que or iced tea around there either. Obvious signs of a primitive culture.

[JackC 0]

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Around my house, we've had a device that has been doing that for years. We close the refrigerator door. It stops the light and keeps stuff cool at the same time. Seems like a bunch of Harvard pointy-heads would be able to figure this out.

The Dark Sucker Theory

For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light, but recent information has proved otherwise. Electric bulbs don't emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers.

The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove that dark has mass and is heavier than light. First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in. There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck dark than the ones in this room.

So with all things, Dark Suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot on a full Dark Sucker. A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle.

One of the disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range. There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can't handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.

Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem as the mass must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat and therefore it's not wise to touch an operating candle. Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats at the top. The is why it is called light.

Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet. But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.

Next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is a Dark Sucker.

[jtval 0]

omg Jack we ( a few friends and I) were talking about this for YEARS!

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[n2skdvn 0]

Ummmm ok.......

if my calculations are correct SLINKY + ESCULATOR = EVERLASTING FUN
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[billvon 3,120]

>One of the problems of electricity is the resistance of the wire. The
>colder you get it, the less resistance. Less resistance, faster speed.

I think you're talking about superconductivity rather than a BEC. In any case, one of the reasons superconducting switching devices (like Josephson junctions) are so attractive is that they're very low power. Power is one of the things that limits the size of modern computers - they just plain get too hot during operation if their density exceeds a certain limit.

[billvon 3,120]

>if the suit stopped light, wouldnt you also be blind when wearing the suit?

Well, yeah, but that's not anything unusual. A big piece of black cloth stops light as well, and if you were under it, you'd also be blind. Of course, you'd also be effectively invisible in a dark room.

[happythoughts 0]

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>One of the problems of electricity is the resistance of the wire. The
>colder you get it, the less resistance. Less resistance, faster speed.

I think you're talking about superconductivity rather than a BEC. In any case, one of the reasons superconducting switching devices (like Josephson junctions) are so attractive is that they're very low power. Power is one of the things that limits the size of modern computers - they just plain get too hot during operation if their density exceeds a certain limit.

Superconductivity is part of it. Conductivity does increase with the temp decrease. But I was referring to wire conductivity, not heat.

There was a paper written by Steve Scott (a Cray senior architect) a couple of years ago that specifically addressed on-chip wire delay. Years ago, Seymour Cray said that no wire could exceed 18 inches on a bus. Wire shortness is one reason why his computers were round.

One of the bigger roadblocks to clock speed now is on-chip wire delay, not macro-wiring problems.

Cooling a wire to almost absolute zero would provide superconductivity, but create other problems with the properties of metal at that temperature.