Light, it is funny stuff. For ages people didn’t even realise that it was there. It is one of the very few things in the universe that is totally invisible. Also strange is darkness. Darkness is when nothing is there, but you still can’t see through it. Strange.
Anyway, for many years people have known that we were coming to the end of the road with current computing. Silicon based computers, that is computers based on sand, are reaching their upper limits of potential. You can see this even in home computing where most new innovations, if you can call them that, are in doubling chips. Core DUO processors.
So what is next? Light. If you can use light to store information, and don’t get started on CD’s they only use light to read /write the information, then you can start to use quantum physics to manage the flow of data. This opens up all sorts of wild and fanciful ideas about the multi-state nature of quantum particles. Rather than just on or off, they can be in many different states, most of which have groovy names like “blue” and “waffles”. The effect on computing would be a massive injection of processing power. I mean massive. “Matrix” massive. Cyberpunk massive. Landing on Mars massive. With such computational power we could build models of such splendid complexity that run so smoothly that the effect on the world research would be amazing. We can build computers that are so quick that they can work out the existence of Rice Pudding and Income Tax before we even finish hooking them up!
This was, of course, firmly in the realms of fantasy and wishful thinking. Oh, and Startrek.
Until recently. The first problem is the speed of light, which as all kiddies know, if bloody fast. I was always told that light speed was a constant. This isn’t the case. Light speed in a vacuum is light the upper limit of speed in the galaxy. Nothing can go father. To explain, light speed is like the horizon. No matter how fast you drive your car, and it can be many times faster than the car behind you, you can never catch the horizon. That is how one should think of light speed in a vacuum. But what if it isn’t in a vacuum? Well, it turns out that you can slow it down. And this is the breakthrough. Slowing down light to speeds where you can actually manipulate it means you can use it as super fast RAM and our journey towards the Matrix is one step closer.
BEHOLD!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/21/japanese_light_trap/
Scientists have used silicon crystals to trap light and slow it down to the lowest speed ever recorded in the material. The breakthrough is a step towards light-based storage for quantum computers.
Researchers at Japanese telco NTT used man-made photonic crystals, which contain nanoscale holes, to achieve the feat. The cavity which controlled the light was less than ten millionths of a metre long.
The photon-trapping set-up slowed the light down to just 5.8 kilometres per second - 50,000 times less than the speed of light in a vacuum - by actually trapping it in the cavity for a nanosecond.
Well, we are not quite ready to start ordering up a dozen agents and learning Kung Fu in a few minutes yet, but we are on the way ladies and Jellyspoons and frankly I can’t wait.
Basho
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