Physicists Store, Retrieve a "Squeezed Vacuum"

An anonymous reader sends us to the site of Science Magazine for news that will interest those who have followed experiments to slow and stop light. Research groups in Canada and Japan have succeeded separately in storing a special kind of vacuum — a "squeezed vacuum" — in a puff of gas and then retrieving it a split second later. Such experiments might lead to advances in quantum encryption. At the very least they will help to illuminate the boundary between quantum and classical realms.

There is no boundry

[iminplaya]

It's a matter of perception, which is very limited when you see the universe through a pinhole.

That drawing board is getting a bit small...

[zappepcs]

If you stop to think about how science has advanced in the last 20 years your brain, like mine, might explode. DNA, human genome, genetic medical treatments, dark matter, hawking radiation, quantum related developments... all leading up to 2012? There are people alive right now that when they were born, germs were unknown never mind planes, space travel, dark matter, and something as small as an atom. Mind you, there are few like that still alive, but there are. At no time in history has information advanced so much in so short a time. The Internet has helped play a part in that also.

Should quantum computing become reality, perhaps we will have 400000x current computing power on our desktops. At that point, voice recognition becomes reality, huge data stores become reality and usable. Things like this could push the information age into a whole new era.

meeting of the minds

[slide-rule]

I can't help but be amused at the thought of God, Newton, and Einstein sitting together "up there, somewhere" looking down on this little science experiment, chuckling at how we having it all wrong, and then thinking, just to fsck with us, they'll go along with our theory for a little while. *POIT!* (vacuum disappears and reappears), to which they have a long, hearty, teary-eyed laugh at our expense and dare us to make *that* make sense. ;-)

Re:meeting of the minds

[gardyloo]

Interesting, but I can't help but thinking that that post is a bit of philosophical wanking. If the experiment is *not* wrong (few experiments are, though they may not show what the experimenter set out to show, or may be misinterpreted, etc.), what then? God, Newton, and Einstein disappear? That'd be a lark.

    I can't believe I just replied to that.

Re:Quantum computers

[SeekerDarksteel]

I don't see it happening in the near-future, but perhaps near the end of my life-time (I'm 20-something). And it won't be like the first computer revolution, with guys in their garages and basements screwing around with computer hardware. The first quantum computers will be only really useful for large Monte-Carlo projects (like the Earth Simulator) that require tons of computing power.

Quantum computing is nigh worthless for Monte-Carlo. Yes, you can simulate a ton of inputs and get a ton of outputs in one run, but it all collapses into one waveform in the end anyway. Throw in the fact that Monte-Carlo simulations are classified as "embarrassingly" parallel and Monte-Carlo is the last thing you'll see on quantum computing.

The problem then becomes building a quantum computer that is faster than the supercomputers of the time. The first quantum computer prototype won't just start out as a powerhouse. After we get the first quantum computer working, it may be up to a decade before we see one actually being used.

The entire notion of faster or slower is thrown out the window with quantum computing. The power of a quantum computer is not limited by its speed, but the number of qubits. Furthermore, the first quantum computer prototype already exists. Indeed it is far from a powerhouse; it was used to factor the number 15. If we could expand the number of qubits arbitrarily we would have functional laboratory quantum computers, but it's our inability to increase the number of qubits because of decoherence and other physical limitations that prevents us from having useful quantum computers.

Re:That drawing board is getting a bit small...

[MadnessASAP]

And the implanting of all of the governments programm^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ideals at birth.

Re:Mark My Words

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Dude - humans *are* the Singularity.

Re:Mark My Words

[smallfries]

He's taking the piss out of you because it's the polite thing to do when a geek-rapture crazy comes out of the woodwork.

Re:That drawing board is getting a bit small...

[earthbound kid]

Pie in the sky.

In 1903, man flew in a heavier than air craft for the first time. In 1969, man landed on the moon. Therefore, in 2001, man will have moon bases and be able to send a manned mission to Jupiter.

Sorry, it didn't work out like that.

Why not?

Because we haven't invented any new rocket fuels since the 60s, and conventional rocket fuels suck. All that Jetsons/Star Trek stuff was based on the theory that we would keep ramping up the curve at the same speed, but in reality, we hit a plateau and leveled off.

The same thing is already starting to happen to computers. Notice how the GHz race has slowed to a trickle? In 2000, Intel broke the GHz barrier with the Pentium III. Today, eight years later, I use a 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Why is my chip "only" doing twice as many GHz? Because there's a brick wall and Intel is running up against it. The faster you go, the exponentially more heat you generate. Worse than that, no matter what cooling system you use, the fact is that 299,792,458 m/s / 1 cm = 29.9792458 GHz. That is, you can never get a signal from one side of a .5cm chip and back faster than 30 GHz without breaking the speed of light. So, it's not physically possible that for me to ever get a 30GHz Core 10 Quadro. It ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile quantum computers, while nice for some problems, do not offer generic speed ups for all problems. Quantum computers only aid in some, well-defined problems like factoring numbers. Not all algorithms benefit from the quantum effect. The number you suggested for quantum computers is basically from out of your ass. I think that if we are lucky, we'll see another 100x speed up of computers before we hit the plateau, but eventually they will plateau. I have no doubt of that.

Meanwhile, has science really been moving faster since the internet? QCD was invented before the internet. DNA was discovered and used for making insulin etc. before the internet. Dark matter was on the edge of the internet's coming into being, but dark matter is kind of just a mathematical kludge anyway. "Hey, our math doesn't work. So there must be more stuff here slowing things down (dark matter) and more energy there speeding things up (dark energy)." Our knowledge of dark matter and energy is very crude, almost like the view of the atom in Marie Curie's day.

In any event, the whole "singularity" movement strikes me as being the same eschatological nonsense that human beings have always believed. "OMG, a comet and an earthquake: it's the end of the world!!" No, it's not. For you personally, the end of the world will come in about 120 years max. (Aubrey de Grey is full of crap.) For the rest of the world, there's time enough for things to keep working themselves out. The Earth will keep orbiting the sun. Life will go on. AI researchers will continue to try to make a robot that can run around as well as a four year old. This too shall pass.

Re:But not as small as you think

[earthbound kid]

Calling an asynchronous or subdivided chip "150GHz" is deeply misleading, since in a normal chip, the amount of work done in one cycle is proportionate to the number of gates it can potentially go through, which will naturally be smaller if one uses a subdivided chip. On the other hand, if you look at the Core 2 Duo, even though it only clocks at twice the GHz of a P3, it actually does much more work per cycle, since it has more transistors packed into a smaller space -- which is why Intel is deliberately underclocking the chips, in order to keep them from melting.

At any rate, I think we can both agree that there's a ways to go before we "run out of room at the bottom," but my suggestion is that the bottom may be closer than we think, perhaps even in the ballpark of just 100x current speeds (=speed doubling every 1.5 months for the next decade).