Stoping light in quantum leap

Perhaps not 'stoping' so much as slowing it down. Again, I am amazed. Who would've thought you can slow light down?

Naturally, it's not that simple. Nothing is simple, or common sense, in the quantum world. It seems they use a vocabulary that's similar to our normal day-to-day language (be that english or south eastern mongolian, I suspect), but differs from it in crucial aspects. Differs just enough to be most confusing. It helps to remember that when the word 'quantum' is used in a scientific report, then the meanings of all other words in the report (including 'the' and 'a', or 'stop' for that matter) should be interpreted with that in mind. The meanings of these words also seem to enter the non-intuitive realm of quantum mechanics. Okay, I won't get any more lyrical on the subject. You get the idea.

The article relates to quantum computing, rather than to slowing down light. The techniques used here will pave the way, theoretically, to quantum computer memory. From what I understand, this is a very big step towards the reality of quantum computers.

Researchers from the Laser Physics Centre in the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering used a modified crystal to ‘stop’ light for over a second, more than 1000 times longer than earlier attempts.

“Stopping light is not just a neat trick, it is the basis of a quantum memory — a device capable of storing and recalling the quantum states of light. This is one of many quantum computing components under development in our lab,” Dr Sellars said.

“We have gone out on a limb pursuing our unique approach to quantum computing. What our new record shows is that we are on the right track,” Dr Longdell said. “Now, if we can store a single photon we will have demonstrated the world’s first quantum memory.”

I'll keep an eye on this thread...and then perhaps I can add it to the 'quantum computer timeline' in the wikipedia

USATODAY.com - Nanotech researchers report big breakthrough

They've finally come up with sheets of nanotubes:

The team has developed an automated process that produced 2 ¾-inch-wide strips of nanotubes at a rate of about 47 feet per minute. Other methods take much longer to create nanotube sheets.

And what's important:

"The technique is most elegant and the applications they've shown are quite impressive," says nanotube expert Shalom Wind of Columbia University in New York. Industry and academic researchers are already regarding nanotubes with avid interest, he adds.

Common Sense vs Uncommon Sense

I'm not going to add anything to this. Just read Horgan's thesis and then further down the page Susskind's counter argument.

Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005)

The dogs are rendered comatose by replacing their blood with a cold saline solution. In this state the dogs are considered dead as they don't breathe and have no heart or brain activity. Then, three hours later, they are revived by replacing the solution in their veins with their blood and giving them an electric shock. They come out of this, I presume, as good as...well...as good as they went into it.

During the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.

Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.

Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.

The technique will be useful, not so much for the scifi purpose of travelling lightyears, but to save lives:

But even this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.

I can imagine this can help hospitals cope with large numbers of casualties from some catastrophic event.

SPACE.com -- The Biggest Starquake Ever

The resulting flash of energy -- which lasted only a tenth of a second -- released more energy than the Sun emits in 150,000 years.

A magnetar has an...well, I suppose it's a 'magnetar quake' then...and the energy released is so much that a 'tenth of a second' blast will blow back the hair of even the most hardened astrophysicist (wildly assuming he has hair). The physics and magnetarophysics of these entities (magnetars and not necessarily astrophysicists) are most fascinating.

Neutron stars form when a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel to burn. Under the weight of its own gravity, the star's core collapses into either a dense neutron star, or an even denser black hole.

The particles inside a neutron star are so tightly packed together that electrons are forced into the atomic nucleus, where they fuse with protons to make neutrons. This pure neutron material is so dense that a spoonful of it would weigh over a billion tons on Earth.

Some of these [magnetars] have intense magnetic fields, which are trillions of times greater than the Earth's magnetic field. On the high end of magnetic neutron stars are the magnetars.

Wonder what my compass will do on one of these things (apart, I suppose, from smearing itself to a sub-nanometer thin film over the surface.)

Is bubble fusion back? (July 2005) - News - PhysicsWeb

And some more on what is now obviously known as 'bubble fusion'.

Realistic Time Machine? New design could forgo exotic ingredient: Science News Online, July 16, 2005

A bit more information...

A New Class of Time Machine

Not much is said on this 'physorg' page - an abstract is quoted. I assume no-one has read the actual paper yet.

Some recent dinosaur discoveries (for Thomas, the mammal):

Dinosaur reclassified as crocodile

June 23, 2005

The find suggests that, rather than rising together, meat-eating theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex existed long before the plant-eating ornithischians, researchers said in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences.

Traditionally these teeth were thought to belong to the ornithischians (bird-hipped). Admittedly, I don't know much and am confused. Nothing new, I know, but still.

From LiveScience:

"This find is a great thing for the crocodilian record, too," Parker said. "Here's this totally unrecognized group of possibly herbivorous crocodilians," Parker said.

The sort of crocodiles one can get comfortable with...but, let me see now, they thought the teeth belonged to the herbivorous ornithischians (do you get carniverous ones?), but it turns out they belonged to herbivorous crocodiles? I had better go read those articles again. The main gist of this excursion into the treacherous mists of paleontology is that they've been classifying dinosaurs, especially those bird-hipped ones, the friendly plant-eating ones, using teeth only, and now they're going to have to go back and rethink the whole thing. We'll give them some time.

Eastern Montana's B. rex now yields female bone tissue

June 02, 2005

Okay, blogging is such that you'll have to read the entry below this one first if you want to get the sequence right (which you don't really need to but for those pedants among us...).

Here we have something they've apparently been looking for all these years, bone tissue of a kind that can be used to identify the gender of the original owner of said tissue, the dinosaur. The tissue is common in birds (which, like dinosaurs used to, lay eggs - pertinent to this discussion), and has been conspicuously absent from dinosaurs, until, as they say, now.

The Tyrannosaurus rex known as B. rex has now yielded bone tissue that is common in female birds, said Mary Higby Schweitzer.

What I said.

The discovery not only means that B. rex was female, but it signifies the end of a scientific treasure hunt, according to Schweitzer who announced her discovery in the June 3 issue of the journal Science.

Researchers have long predicted they would find medullary tissue in dinosaurs, but they hadn't found it until it appeared in the hind thigh bones of B. rex, Schweitzer said. Scientists expected to find the tissue in dinosaurs because other evidence linking birds and dinosaurs is so robust and all female birds have medullary tissue.

Exactly. It's obvious I find myself on a sure footing with this article. I can flaunt it, I can move it, move it. Nevermind

Schweitzer said she was trying to get at the microstructure of the bone by partially removing the mineral when she came across the soft tissue and blood vessels that led to her first paper in Science. That paper was published March 25 and led to a storm of publicity because the finding was significant, unexpected and controversial.

Which leads us, in this temporal labyrinth, to the next/previous entry.

Blood vessels recovered from T. rex bone

March 24, 2005

I found this (and I suspect I'm not the only one) just so extraordinary:

Palaeontologists have extracted soft, flexible structures that appear to be blood vessels from the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago. They also have found small red microstructures that resemble red blood cells.

Soft tissue. Blood vessels. In rock?! Preserved through all the shit that rocks have to go through to become...rocks. Temperatures and pressures. Soft and stretchy and lithification. They don't belong together. Surely? Is nothing sacred anymore?

"[The T. rex paper] suggests that biological and biochemical information might be recoverable from a wide range of fossil material," says Angela Milner of the Natural History Museum, in London, UK, who has detected proteins in Iguanadon bone. "There certainly seem to be blood vessels," she told New Scientist.

BBC NEWS | Health | Brain cells are matured in lab

An article from Tuesday, 14 June, 2005 which does my sense of being not much good either. Nobody told me the mature brain can produce brain cells.

A little more than a decade ago, scientists came to realise that the brain continues to produce small amounts of new cells even in adulthood.

They also neglected to mention that braincells have been produced, in the lab, from stem cells.

It is not the first time that immature stem cells have been manipulated in the laboratory to become brain cells.

But now I know. Of course the bugger is that, and I can confirm this from personal experience, the mature brain can't do it fast enough.

The scientists on the other hand seem to have a handle on this:

"Then we thaw them, begin a cell-generating process, and produce a ton of new neurons."

As with all these discoveries, it seems they have yet to find a good use for it...

"More importantly, as is the case for all tissue culture models, they are a long way from showing that such cells could be of therapeutic potential."

American Scientist Online - An interview with Michael Gazzaniga

Author of "The Ethical Brain", which I haven't read yet, but the interview is very interesting and worth having a look at.

DARPA picks 40 robot hopefuls for $2m race | The Register

It sounds like this time things are going to be different. Can't wait.

"It is truly remarkable how much progress the Grand Challenge teams have made in a relatively short period of time,” said program manager Ron Kurjanowicz. “The (qualification event) will be very exciting and we will see autonomous vehicle performance that was not possible a year ago. The teams’ creative sparks are flying and they are making impressive progress toward DARPA’s goal of developing technologies that will save the lives of our men and women in uniform on the battlefield.”

But really:

"...DARPA’s goal of developing technologies that will save the lives of our men and women in uniform on the battlefield.”

I suppose this is funny in light of last year's event. Reminds me a bit of the graffiti: "Fighting for peace..."

Researchers find way to produce very large diamonds very fast

A while back they discovered diamond stars, and now they're making them in blocks:

The standard growth rate is 100 micrometers per hour for the Carnegie process, but growth rates in excess of 300 micrometers per hour have been reached, and 1 millimeter per hour may be possible. With the colorless diamond produced at ever higher growth rate and low cost, large blocks of diamond should be available for a variety of applications. "The diamond age is upon us," concluded Hemley.

It will never be the same again.

Beam Me to Mars :: Astrobiology Magazine :: Search for Life in the Universe

This is just so fiendish:

A typical Mars mission would begin as Earth and Mars are approaching the point of closest alignment as they progress in their orbits, with the Earth slightly behind Mars. A conventional rocket first launches the target spacecraft into orbit around Earth. The Magbeam station would fire a plasma beam at the target spacecraft for about four hours, giving it a boost toward Mars. The spacecraft coasts to Mars in about 50 days, after which another station in orbit around Mars fires a plasma beam at the spacecraft to slow it down.

The spacecraft goes into orbit around Mars and the astronauts descend to explore the surface. After 11 days, they launch to Mars orbit, where the Martian station fires its plasma beam again to accelerate the spacecraft toward Earth. After coasting toward Earth, the station in orbit around Earth fires its plasma beam at the spacecraft to capture it in Earth orbit.

And then onto Jupiter:

If the challenges can be overcome, the Magbeam system will offer several benefits: First, a fast trip to Mars will reduce the space radiation hazard to astronauts. High-speed particles from the Sun and interstellar space continually bombard any spacecraft traveling between planets. However, this space radiation can be deflected by planetary magnetic fields or absorbed by a planet's atmosphere. Getting astronauts quickly from one planet to another will reduce their exposure to space radiation. The high-speed makes Magbeam useful for missions beyond Mars as well, "We think this would be a good system for delivering payloads to Jupiter and beyond," said Winglee.

PhysOrg: Carnegie Mellon robot will run time trials to enter $2 million desert race

Just a reminder that this race is happening in October. I think my first post to this blog concerned this race (I seem to remember that the 'winner' of the race last year only managed something like 7km out of 150km...).

Economist.com | Cold fusion

Not yet a precursor to a starship engine, perhaps, but maybe an ancestor of Dr McCoy's portable diagnosis machine.

Creating fusion using a crystal. As opposed to, for instance, bubbles and rock and roll?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | First synthetic virus created:

That was 11 July, 2002:

Scientists have assembled the first synthetic virus.

To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.

The animals were paralysed and then died.

The more dangerous smallpox virus would be complex and difficult to assemble, but Cello says, "it would probably in the future be possible".

Now, more recent (January 12, 2005), in the International Herald Tribune:

Synthetic virus in reach

An unexpectedly sudden advance in synthesizing long lengths of DNA has put researchers within reach of manufacturing genomes the size of the smallpox virus.

This will permit efficient and rapid synthesis of any Select Agent virus genome in very short order," he said, referring to the list of dangerous pathogens and toxins that possessors are required to register with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In his view, any facility possessing the new DNA synthesis equipment should be assumed capable of making any virus on the Select Agent list.

Church has no interest in synthesizing dangerous pathogens but is aware of the potential for misuse of DNA synthesis. He recently proposed that the machines and ingredients for synthesizing DNA should be controlled, with manufacturers selling supplies only to facilities whose DNA machines are registered.

And then I'll refer the reader to the book "Our Final Century" by Sir Martin Rees, for a more disquieting (I think they use this word quite often in relation to the book) analysis of these and other pending extinction events. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) may also be of interest for keeping an eye on...uhm...the future.

1. Hang in There: The 25-Year Wait for Immortality and 2. Inventor sets his sights on immortality

From 1.:

By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more. Our human genomes will be modified to include the genetic material of microorganisms that live in the soil, enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time and which they can’t digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the way they did at 20 for the rest of their lives, or opt for an older look if they get bored. Of course, everyone will be required to go in for age rejuvenation therapy once every decade or so, but that will be a small price to pay for near-immortality.

Your background is in computer science. How does that qualify you to spearhead a project on aging?

My background is enormously beneficial. There are really very important differences between the type of creativity involved in being a basic scientist and being an engineer. It means that I’m able to think in very different ways and come up with approaches to things that are different from the way a basic scientist might think.

And then from 2.:

The inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.

Why on earth are these computer scientists getting into this immortality thing? And, man, that beard! Metusaleh indeed.

But I have been thinking on this immortality thing, and I want some. I haven't, though, thought of the interesting consequence - that of the sudden increase in value of one's life when you decide to become...well...immortal. No more extreme sports. No more adventures. No more taking a stroll on the wild side.

There was something else, but it's slipped my mind (will have to look into some of those supplements Kurtzweil is suggesting). Will get back to this thread sometime.

Interpretation and Philosophical Foundation of Quantum Mechanics

The situation is quite different in the case of quantum theory [as opposed to the theory of relativity], where we do not have such a generally accepted principle which can serve as the foundation of the theory. Indeed, I would suggest that this is the very reason makes it possible that a variety of different interpretations - in the broader sense - coexist. It is important to notice that nearly all of these interpretations are in agreement with each other when it comes to definite experimental predictions. Therefore, as is to be expected for an interpretation in the broader sense, there is no way - at least not immediately - of experimentally differentiating between them.[my emphasis]

I love the logic of this paragraph. And something else:

In an application of Bohr's statement which says that a quantum phenomenon comprises both the quantum system and the measuring device, Wheeler states that we as observers are free to decide in which way we will bring a quantum phenomenon to its close. We decide, by choosing the measuring device, which phenomenon can become reality and which one cannot. Wheeler explicates this by example of the well-known case of a quasar, of which we can see two pictures through the gravity lens action of a galaxy that lies between the quasar and ourselves. By choosing which instrument to use for observing the light coming from that quasar, we can decide here and now whether the quantum phenomenon in which the photons take part is interference of amplitudes passing on both sides of the galaxy or whether we determine the path the photon took on one or the other side of the galaxy. In both cases the individual process again contains an element that cannot be controlled. For example if we decide to measure the path of the photon - to let the path become reality - we have no influence on which of the two possible paths of the photon actually will be observed.

This is the reason why Wheeler labels the individual quantum phenomenon an elementary act of creation. We as observers play a significant role in this process since we can decide by choosing the measuring device which quantum phenomenon is realized. Still, we cannot influence the specific value obtained through the measurement. Finally, since we are part of the universe, the universe, according to Wheeler, creates itself by observing itself through us.

By observing we influence fundamentally...I recently read a science fiction story by Adam Roberts, called Stone, where he proposes that, because of that influence that a consciousness has on a quantum level, that there exists only one type of consciousness per universe. Of course that's just my interpretation and memory of the story. Will have to reread it. I can certainly recommend the novel...

From the same page:

A very interesting and closely related position is taken by Just[24] from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. He compares the spontaneous and discontinuous reduction of the wave function in the quantum mechanical measuring process with the process of spontaneous realization ("Aha-Erlebnis"), to which in his opinion exactly the same characteristics apply.

I can't say I'm hundred percent sure I understand this (the original is a lecture in German, ja?), but it seems to be the sort of thing that happened when Archimedes ran naked through the streets shouting Eureka!. Eureka-Erlebnis possibly? The sort of feeling you get when you suddenly understand a difficult concept. Something I'm obviously not going to experience soon in my readings of quantum physics.

Starlab research: Christopher Altman

Look at this...

Last summer I held a research fellowship working with the Starlab CAM Brain group in studies designing and evolving artifical neural networks directly in silico. The project combines evolvable hardware and genetic algorithms in a novel approach towards the design and implementation of large-scale neural networks.

Science fiction, or what? Evolvable hardware - I'm sure he's not talking about us (spoedniek speaking for the human race).

My son is 3 years old now. If we (again I'll casually take the liberty of speaking for the human race) survive our own cleverness, I can't begin to imagine what kind of world he's going to inhabit when he's my age. ...uhm...that's 33 years from now. And how do I keep up? I barely know my iPods from my DVD-R...RW+- (What is it with these RW+ and RW-?!) Hey, and I have a job, okay? Can't surf the net all day long...