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NIST Physicists Show ‘Molecules’ Made of Light May Be Possible
- avian 11y agoHere is the original paper on Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03859 http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03859 What the linked article fails to mention among all the fantasizing about light sabers is that this kind of interaction is only possible in matter. These "molecules made of light" can only exist when photons interact with atoms while the light travels in a very special medium. In vacuum, photon-photon interactions do not allow for any kind of bound states like that.
- rubidium 11y agoJust to echo your point: This is an interesting proposal more because of the ability to use for photonic information applications (quantum gates and such) then for light-sabers. Fair warning to those looking at the original paper: I have my PhD as an experimentalist in this field, and it took me a while to work through what they were proposing :)
- amelius 11y agoNote that in the article linked above, no real matter is created, just configurations that "act" as matter. However, from [1]: > [...] scientists at Imperial College London (including a visiting physicist from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) think they’ve figured out how to turn energy directly into matter [...] Their article in Nature Photonics proposes that a new kind of collider be built, one that smashes photons instead of protons, as at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN where the Higgs boson was discovered last year. Of course, this probably requires much more energy. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrodgers/2014/05/19/einstein-was-right-you-can-turn-energy-into-matter/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrodgers/2014/05/19/einstein-...
- rbanffy 11y agoAre they seriously still running a Cold Fusion website? Note: it'd be nice if the site could survive being on HN's cover. My past experience with CF makes me thing it's a poor choice if you want that.
- DiabloD3 11y agoWell, we technically haven't invented warm fusion yet...
- xlm1717 11y agoBelieve it or not, there are still websites out there running Perl with CGI. Not even Danser or Mojolicious, CGI.pm.
- rbanffy 11y agoI wonder how many of those can survive being on the cover of HN.
- Retric 11y agoDepends on HW, but that likely takes less resources than most websites. For reference, an old CF website used to support 60k users and a few thousand page views a second on a dual 450 MHz (Pentium III Xeon 450) cpu's. A modern CPU could probably serve 10x that.
- larrik 11y agoWhy do people think of lightsabers first? I think better control over light leads to true holograms, primarily. Frankly, if holograms and lightsabers both magically appeared tomorrow, I would lean towards holograms being more important.
- Loughla 11y agoThe answer is simple, very, very simple. Lightsabers would be more fun.
- Retric 11y agoHolodeck vs Lightsabers, hmm I am sticking with Holodeck. :)
- kenbellows 11y agoHolodeck implies lightsabers, I think
- delecti 11y agoLightsabers are plasma anyway. So really we should be focusing on fusion research to nail down the magnetic plasma containment technologies.
- _-__--- 11y agotokamak tomahawk?
- A_COMPUTER 11y agoI thought of Arnold Rimmer first.